Benjamin Pitt

The strongest version of this illusion I’ve seen! Absolute head-wrecker!

The market for marriage - Works in Progress Magazine It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good agricultural surplus, must be in want of a wife.

Humans exhibit an astonishing variety of marriage systems. Sometimes monogamous, other times polygamous, occasionally we even marry ghosts. The diversity can seem to defy any general explanation. In my new piece for Works in Progress, I write about the Darwinian logic behind it. 1/

Across Cultures, People Combine Reference Frames to Orient Themselves A 2025 study explores allocentric and egocentric references and whether the two can be integrated simultaneously in a single action.

"We say things like, ‘You have some food on your left cheek,’” said @benjaminpitt.bsky.social. “We would never say that you have some food on your down-river cheek or on your east cheek, but other cultures do.” 

www.psychologicalscience.org/news/2026-ja...

Across Cultures, People Combine Reference Frames to Orient Themselves A 2025 study explores allocentric and egocentric references and whether the two can be integrated simultaneously in a single action.

Fun to see this paper featured in the APS Observer! @psychscience.bsky.social www.psychologicalscience.org/news/2026-ja...

Highly highly recommended! The place is great and @cmolho.bsky.social is fabulous to work with!

Come work with me on cognitive diversity, development & dynamics in beautiful Amherst, Massachusetts! Graduate student applications are due a week from today. cognitiveconstructionlab.com

Positions available - Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Fully funded #PhDposition in Comparative Cultural Psychology @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social.
We will use touchscreen experiments & eyetracking to study mental simulations in nonhuman apes & human children across different cultures.

All info here: www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit...
Please share / apply!🙏

One Action, Two Reference Frames: Compound Cognitive Maps of Object Location - Benjamin Pitt, 2025 To navigate complex physical environments, animals keep track of the spatial relations among objects using various reference frames, both body-based (e.g., left...

Why do people use multiple maps when one would do? And why do people use one combination much more than the opposite combination? Tantalizing answers to these and other questions await in the open-access paper! @psychscience.bsky.social doi.org/10.1177/0956...

This shows people are not limited to using one reference frame at a time, even in the very same action. Instead, people across cultures may habitually use compound cognitive maps composed of multiple reference frames to represent the multidimensional spatial relations of their environment.

A group of US undergrads were more egocentric overall (more blue), but often made the same kind of hybrid responses: Egocentric on the front-back axis and allocentric on the left-right axis at the same time. One action, two reference frames.

Here’s a canoncal response. She finds an object in her far right cup, turns around, and places it in her far LEFT cup. This preserves the object’s EGOcentric position in front-back space (i.e. far, far) but preserves its ALLOcentric position in left-right space (e.g. window-side, window-side).

Here’s what they did. Some of their responses were fully egocentric (blue), and some were fully allocentric (pink), but most were mixed (purple), corresponding to an egocentric frame on one axis and an allocentric frame on the other axis in the very same action (i.e. placing an object in a cup).

The trick is that the cup you choose reveals which reference frame you were using to remember the object’s position. And because of the layout of the cups, choosing a cup actually means choosing a position on both the left-right axis and the front-back axis.

In each trial, participants picked up an object from one of 16 cups laid out on the "study" table (in four groups of four), turned around 180 degrees to face an identical "test" table, and were asked to put the object in the corresponding cup.

The question here is whether they would not only switch quickly between reference frames, but actually mix them together, using one frame on one axis and a different frame on the other axis *at the same time*. To find out, we designed a new, 2-dimensional test of spatial memory, the 4Quads task.

We know from a past study that Tsimane’ switch reference frames depending on which spatial axis is relevant, lateral (left-right) or sagittal (front-back):
tinyurl.com/347h9b2y.

We addressed this question with the Tsimane’, an indigenous group of farmer-foragers living in the Bolivian Amazon.

But neuroscience says otherwise. All sorts of animals – including humans – integrate egocentric and allocentric spatial information all the time, to be able to navigate a complex 3D spatial world. So which is it? One-at-a-time or habitually integrated?

We know people can flexibly switch between egocentric and allocentric reference frames. But on some psycholinguistic accounts, they are limited to using one at a time like in language – you can say “The spoon is on the right” or “The spoon is North” but not both at once.

*Egocentric* coordinates are centered on the body (e.g. my left) and so turn with the observer. *Allocentric* coordinates are based on the environment (e.g. East-West, uphill-downhill), and so stay put even if you don’t.

Like other animals, humans depend on spatial memory to navigate, coordinate the movement of our bodies, and keep track of the hundreds of objects that compose our environment. But there are two fundamentally different ways to remember where things are: body-centered and environment-centered

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

Do people remember where things are relative to their body (e.g. my left side) or relative to the environment (the North/uphill side)? The answer is both at once, according to my new paper now out in Psychological Science! 🧵 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Another great PhD opportunity: An ERC-funded project on “Children as agents of cultural evolution,” lead by @sheinalew.bsky.social at Durham University. Come do fieldwork with Mayan groups in Belize with her, @dorsaamir.bsky.social, and I! One of three, 3-year PhD positions starting Fall 2026.

PhD in Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience : College of Natural Sciences : UMass Amherst Engage in research centered on fundamental theoretical questions about cognitive function using multiple experimental methods and data analysis.

I’ll be considering graduate school applications for Fall 2026 – positions are fully funded, typically for 5 years. Deadline to apply to the Cognition program is December 1. Come do science with me in beautiful Amherst, Massachusetts! www.umass.edu/natural-scie...

The Cognitive Construction Lab will study children and adults across cultures to understand how the diversity of human experience produces a diversity of human minds. Check out the brand new lab website! cognitiveconstructionlab.com

a cartoon of homer simpson says whoo-hoo in front of a stone wall ALT: a cartoon of homer simpson says whoo-hoo in front of a stone wall

I’m delighted to announce that I’ll be joining the faculty at @umassamherst.bsky.social next year as an assistant professor in Psychological & Brain Sciences! 🥳

We have extended the deadline for this position to January 31st. Also, the start date is pretty flexible; if you're graduating next spring/summer and interested in the role, apply!

Our new paper, on the evolution of institutions, is out in PNAS!

How can institutions promote cooperation when they themselves rely on cooperation? Check out JB's awesome thread!

Very proud of this paper with @jliep.bsky.social, N. Baumard, @jbaptistandre.bsky.social!
www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

No evidence for inequity aversion in non-human animals: a meta-analysis of accept/reject paradigms | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Disadvantageous inequity aversion (IA), a negative response to receiving less than others, is a key building block of the human sense of fairness. While some theorize that IA is shared by species acro...

No evidence for inequity aversion in non-human animals: a #meta-analysis of accept/reject paradigms
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
New paper led by Oded Ritov and w/ @nicholaraihani.bsky.social and Jan Engelmann.