Monica Bucciarelli

 

Investigates the role of mental models in various sorts of reasoning, from how children and adults devise informal algorithms (to rearrange the order of the carriages in a railway train) to the inferences they draw from premises about moral principles.  Her recent studies examine the relations between the strength of individuals’ beliefs about what is right and what is wrong, and their emotional reactions to these beliefs. She is a professor of psychology in the University of Turin, Italy, and on the editorial boards of several cognitive journals.