I am a philosopher investigating nonhuman and human animal minds and cognition.
I was educated in logic and philosophy of science at the University of Milan, my hometown, and in philosophy of mind at the University of Edinburgh. I then completed a PhD at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology at Antwerp University, with a dissertation entitled Animal Intention. This work represents the first systematic theory of intention applied to the study of animal cognition from a philosophical, ethological, psychological, and neuroscientific perspective. The main claim is that chimpanzees are capable of sophisticated forms of planning that meet the constraints of Bratman's account of planning agency and, they are thus capable of acting, even though they lack conceptual representations. This is the main reference in defence of animal action discussed in the Action entry of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Over the years I worked on different projects addressing questions on temporal cognition, consciousness, mental content, social cognition, and mental imagery.
In 2016 I was the youngest scholar to be awarded the Research Associate Fellowship of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University in the City of New York. Between 2015 and 2017 I was Early Career Fellow of the Lichtenberg-Kolleg at the University of Göttingen and of the Leibniz Institute for Primate Research. The Leibniz Foundation also sponsored my work at the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University in winter 2017. In 2018 I have been awarded the Postdoctoral Fellowship of the Sidney M. Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I was Visiting Professor in Animal Minds at Boğaziçi University, in Istanbul in summer 2018. And in 2019 I have been funded by the Israeli Science Foundation to carry on research at Bar-Ilan University, in Tel Aviv. As of 2020, I am Research Associate of the Cognition in Action Unit at the University of Milan, and from April 2023 I am a Senior Fellow at the Center for Mind & Cognition of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum.
I am currently working on John Michael's BIAL project "Mapping the psychophysiology of commitment" at the Cognition in Action Unit at the University of Milan.