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I am a cognitive scientist broadly interested in the evolution and development of social cognition. My research focuses on how the mind represents the social world in terms of its constituent interactions, relations, and structures. I strive to develop a mechanistically tractable account of how humans from the first years of life form and flexibly transition among these representations. 

 

In my research, I use behavioral and EEG methods to explore how infants, children, and adults interpret third-party interactions. My research is deeply informed by the theories and tools of anthropology, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive linguistics. Prior to pursuing cognitive science, I studied history and philosophy of biology. 

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I recently completed my postdoctorate in the Cognitive Development Center at CEU (Vienna) and am currently on the job market!

In my latest projects, I examined how cost-benefit analysis guides the representation of helping in infancy (with Laura Schlingloff) and what kinds of (dispositional or relational) inferences children and adults draw from the observation of dominance interactions (with Barbara Pomiechowska). I am also conducting online replications of established looking-time studies to assess the feasibility of infant online testing.

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During my PhD (with Gergely Csibra and Dan Sperber) I investigated how infants interpret different types of transfer (giving and taking), which social relations they infer from these actions, and which structural assumptions and coordination rules they expect these relations to conform to. You can find my dissertation here. 

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In parallel, I worked on a number of other topics, such as early sociomoral evaluation (with Olivier Mascaro), the development of fairness expectations, the treatment of looking-time data, the origins of ostension understanding, and the learning of action role concepts (with Jun Yin). 

Publications

Journal Articles

       
        * indicates joint first autorship​​​​
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  • Tatone, D., & Pomiechowska, B. (in press). Questioning the nature and origins of the "social agent" concept. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
     

  • Tatone, D. & Csibra, G. (2024). The representation of giving actions. Event construction in the service of monitoring social relationships. Current Directions in Psychological Science. [pdf]

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  • Tatone, D. (2023). What do infants need an ownership concept for? Frugal possession concepts can adequately support early reasoning about distributive dilemmas. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 46, E351. doi:  10.1017/S0140525X23001267
     

  • Schlingloff, L, Tatone, D., & Csibra, G. (2023). The representation of third-party helping interactions in infancy. Annual Review of Psychology, 5. [pdf]
     

  • Tatone, D., Schlingloff, L., & Pomiechowska, B. (2023). Infants do not use payoff information to infer individual goals in joint-action events. Cognitive Development, 66, 101329. [pdf]
     

  • Altinok, N., Tatone, D., Kiraly, I., Heintz., C., & Gergely, G. (2022). If you presume relevance, you don't need a bifocal lens. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 45, E250. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X22001352 
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  • Yin, J.*, Csibra, G., & Tatone, D.* (2022). Structural asymmetries in the representation of giving and taking events. Cognition, 229, 105248. [pdf]
     

  • Tatone, D. (2022) More than one way to skin a cat. Addressing the arbitration problem in developmental science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 45, E123. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X21001400.

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  • Tatone, D., Hernik, M., Csibra, G. (2021). Facilitation of object encoding in infants by the observation of giving. Scientific Reports, 11, 18305. [pdf]​

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  • Schlingloff, L., Csibra, G., & Tatone, D. (2020). Do 15-month-old infants prefer helpers? A Replication of Hamlin et al. (2007). Royal Society Open Science, 7(4), 191795. [pdf]

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  • Yin, J.*, Tatone, D.*, & Csibra, G. (2020). Giving, but not taking, actions are spontaneously represented as social interactions: Evidence from modulation of lower alpha oscillations. Neuropsychologia, 139, 107363. *co-first authors [pdf]

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  • Tatone, D., Hernik, M., & Csibra, G. (2019). Minimal cues of possession transfer compel infants to ascribe the goal of giving. Open Mind, 3, 31-40. [pdf]

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  • Csibra, G., Hernik, M., Mascaro, O., Tatone, D., & Lengyel, M. (2016). Statistical treatment of looking-time data. Developmental psychology, 52(4), 521. [pdf]

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  • Salvadori*, E., Blazsekova*, T., Volein, A., Karap, Z., Tatone, D.*, Mascaro, O.*, & Csibra, G. (2015). Probing the strength of infants' preference for helpers over hinderers: Two replication attempts of Hamlin and Wynn (2011). PloS One, 10(11), e0140570. *co-first authors [pdf]

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  • Tatone, D., Geraci, A., & Csibra, G. (2015). Giving and taking: Representational building blocks of active resource-transfer events in human infants. Cognition, 137, 47-62. [pdf]

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  • Tatone, D., & Csibra, G. (2015). Learning in and about opaque worlds. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 38, e68. [pdf]
     

Conference Proceedings 

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  • Schlingloff-Nemecz, L., Csibra, G., Tatone, D., & Pomiechowska, B. (2024). Infants expect an agent to choose a goal that can be reached at a lower cost. Proceedings of the 44nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
     

  • Steele, C., Richardson, M., Taylor, A., Tatone, D., & Thomas, A. (2024). Early Threads of Connection: Probing Infants’ Early Understandings of Caregiving Relationships. Proceedings of the 44nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
     

  • Pomiechowska, B.*, Tatone, D.*, Meszegeto, D., Revencu, B., & Csibra, G. (2022). Children, but not adults, prioritize relational over dispositional interpretations of dominance interactions. In Proceedings of the 44th. Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society [pdf]
     

  • Tatone, D., & Csibra, G. (2020). Infants infer different types of social relations from giving and taking actions. In Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2981–2987. [pdf]

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  • Schlingloff, L., Tatone, D., Pomiechowska, B., & Csibra, G. (2020). Do infants think that agents choose what’s best? In Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 1495-1501. [pdf]
     

Manuscripts Under Review​​​​​
 

  • Lucca, K., ..., Tatone, D., et al. Infants’ Social Evaluation of Helpers and Hinderers: A Large-Scale, Multi-Lab, Coordinated Replication Study. Developmental Science. 
     

  • Legg, E. W., ...., Tatone, D., ..., & Ostojic, L. Assessing the reporting and interpretation of non-significant results in the study of cognitive development: a systematic review. Infant and Child Development.
     

  • Taylor, D., [...], Tatone, D., & Dezecache, G. The motivation to inform others: A field experiment with wild chimpanzees. PeerJ. 

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Manuscripts In Preparation​

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  • Tatone, D., & Csibra, G. Infants’ expectations of distributive fairness are influenced by the type of allocation procedure observed.
     

  • Tatone, D. Bookkeeping, reciprocity, and the evolution of active transfer.​​

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  • Pomiechowska, B.*, Tatone, D.*, & Csibra, G. Infants assume relationships to be based on univocal coordination rules.
     

  • Yin, J.*, Tatone, D.*, & Csibra, G. Giving induces infants to track individuals in a label-mapping paradigm.

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  • Tatone, D., Pomiechowska, B., Schlingloff-Nemecz, L., Varga, B., Kalman, P., & Csibra, G. Efficiency-based goal ascription in infancy. A replication via Zoom.

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Contact

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Denis Tatone

Central European University

Department of Cognitive Science

Quellenstrasse 51

1100, Vienna, Austria

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