Pierre Pica
June 3, 2011
Pierre Pica is a Research Fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. For ten years he worked on Mundurucu, an indigenous language spoken in the State of Pará, Brazil. He works with Stanislas Dehaene and Elizabeth Spelke in a study that suggest that knowledge or culture can be partly reduced to a small number of universal principles and intuitions. They gave rise to a series of publication in the journal Science. Pierre's recent publications raise questions about relationships of language, schooling, culture and cognition in geometric knowledge, for example: Geometry as Universal Mental Construction. In collaboration with Véronique Izard, Stanislas Dehaene, Danielle Hinchey & Elizabeth Spelke (2011), in Stanislas Dehaene & Elizabeth Brannon eds., Space, Time and Number in the Brain. Searching for the Foundations of Mathematical Thought. Flexible intuitions of Euclidean geometry in an Amazonian indigene group. In collaboration with Véronique Izard, Stanislas Dehaene & Elizabeth Spelke (2011), in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
