Larry Barsalou is definitively the person who has influenced my scientific activity most deeply. Everything started when I was a graduate student in Psychology at the University of Bologna and went to the University of Chicago as a visiting scholar. I had read all of Larry’s papers, had the chance to go abroad during the PhD, and asked to visit him.

It was 1994, my first time in the States. I lived at the International House, and the activity in Larry’s lab was fervent – I remember Barbara Luka, Wenchi Ye, and Karen Olseth working on their PhD projects and discussing experimental paradigms. I also remember, among many others, Jesse Prinz, participating in a larger seminar. The atmosphere was warm and friendly, and Larry was always available for suggestions and advice. When I met him for the first time, he warned me of the possible dangers of a big American city, and I appreciated that we did not speak only about science. Once, we went to a rock concert with various people – Patty Smith, if I remember well (-; Steven Sloman was there, too.

During the first period in Chicago, Larry guided me in conducting a study on how concepts vary across contexts. One of the reasons why I asked Larry to visit his lab was my interest in concepts, particularly conceptual flexibility. Many people were working on concepts, knowledge’s minimal units, and the more stable aspects characterizing them. What I loved – and love – in Larry’s work is that he focused on the variable aspects of conceptual representation, on how people continuously update their knowledge depending on the context and the situation.

His work on ad-hoc and goal-derived categories has shown that people might form categories on the fly based on goals that can be contingent. This profound intuition shakes the basis of various theories of concepts – members of a category need not be perceptually similar – for example, the category “things to take on a camping trip” can include exemplars as diverse as a toothbrush, a book, a tent, and a pet.

This intuition has influenced a lot of my subsequent work – with various collaborators, I have tried to show how concepts change – for example, how the concepts of illness and proximity have changed during COVID-19, how gender is differently conceptualized across social groups and cultures/languages, and how concepts related to technology and climate change for different generations. I attempted to explain goal-derived categories through a computational model based on neural networks and proposed that the flexibility characterizing goal-derived categories can be the basis that allows the forming of abstract concepts.

Later I visited Larry when he was at Emory University, in Atlanta, as a post-doc. Diane Pecher and Renee Zeelenberg were there and worked on perceptual modalities. I also remember Serge Chaigneau working on his dissertation. In Chicago and then in Atlanta, I remember Elisabeth, Larry’s older daughter, when she was a child. In that period, we conducted a study, published years later, on how concepts activate various features depending on the perspective (e.g., near vs. far). If percepts had perspectives, then concepts should also have perspectives – this was our reasoning. It was the period in which Larry had developed the perceptual symbols theory.

What I also admire about Larry’s work is that it is strongly theoretically founded; each experiment is a step to test a systematic theory.  The ideas of embodiment, grounded cognition, and simulation, as proposed by Larry, have been extremely influential in my research. For many years, I have worked to investigate whether objects evoke affordances, i.e., simulated actions, and language comprehension evokes simulation, addressing to what extent this simulation is fine-grained – for example, whether it is sensitive to the object’s size and texture, to emotions, to the effector with which an action is performed. I remember once describing to Larry one of the first studies on affordances conducted with colleagues in Bologna. We presented images of objects preceded by a hand displaying a precision or a power grip, and we investigated the compatibility between the presented grip and the object’s size. Larry suggested I try using more primes, thus improving generalizability and flexibility. This invitation to consider flexibility was important for all my further research.

Recently, I have worked extensively on abstract concepts (e.g., “freedom”). This research line has been deeply influenced by Larry’s thinking, too. I believe explaining them represents a major challenge for embodied and grounded cognition, and this acknowledgment was influenced by Larry’s work on abstraction. Furthermore, the Language And Situated Simulation (LASS) theory Larry proposed with some colleagues inspired our work on the importance of language for abstract concepts. Similarly, his paper with Katja Wiemer-Hastings is a crucial reference for our work on abstractness and social interaction. Finally, Larry’s idea that we need to go beyond the abstract-concrete distinction since each concept might include both concrete and abstract aspects and that abstractness is flexible has been crucial for our recent work, in which we show that abstractness varies depending on culture, expertise, and age.

Methodologically, I learned a lot from Larry. Larry is very careful in handling data and extremely precise. Once, he told me he considered 40% of his activity (I might not remember the exact percentage) to be dedicated to control. Crucially for my further research, I also learned from Larry to use feature listing tasks. I remember collecting feature production data at the campus, even at a parade. We transcribed features and then coded them. You are a good coder, once he said to me. Probably also because of this, I have always loved feature listing and coding.

If somebody asked me to produce three words associated with Larry, I would say “enthusiasm,” “flexibility,” and “depth.” The thing about Larry is that he is so warm, open, and flexible also in his relationships with people. I remember him encouraging me to collaborate with other scientists – with Art Glenberg for some studies on language and embodiment and with Lewis Wheaton, with whom I conducted various studies on affordances. When talking with Larry, things always get deep – also when we discuss family and life, as we did many times. Thank you, Larry, for your depth, flexibility, and example.