Dear All,

The CEU Department of Cognitive Science and the Center for Cognitive Computation invites you to the following online talk titled: Updating, Evidence Evaluation, and Operator Availability: A Framework for Understanding Belief

Speaker: Joseph Sommer (Princeton)

Abstract: How does human belief work? In contrast to the normative assumption that people update their beliefs via Bayes’ rule, psychologists have documented belief phenomena which appear at odds with Bayesian updating. Moreover, the fact that people often arrive at disparate beliefs in domains from politics to science may seem difficult to account for on the assumption that beliefs aim at truth. Such considerations have led to the postulation of irrational, a-rational, and instrumentally rational belief processes to explain human belief. In this talk, I suggest that conclusions of non-Bayesian updating are too hasty. I argue that beliefs are the outputs of multiple cognitive processes and, as such, understanding belief requires distinguishing between updating, narrowly construed, and a series of additional psychological processes involved in human belief. I introduce a novel framework which situates these processes in three levels of nested influence. At Level 1, belief updating is suggested to be approximately Bayesian and more sensitive to evidence than it is usually given credit for. At Level 2, an additional set of processes evaluates evidence and determines what information is presented to Level 1 for updating. Level 2 processes share two characteristics: they are necessarily heuristic and fallible, as well as cognitively penetrable (Pylyshyn, 1999) to desires and goals. Finally, at Level 3, factors including information representation and individual differences imply different operators (Newell & Simon, 1972) to evidence evaluation processes at Level 2. By manipulating Level 2 processes, people may “steer” their updating mechanisms toward particular subsets of evidence and thereby alter the beliefs they come to possess. This framework offers a nuanced and principled account of human belief which specifies where and under what circumstances irrationality may enter the picture.

Chair: József Fiser

Time and date: Tuesday, April 22, 3 PM

Venue: CEU Budapest site (1051 Budapest, Nádor u. 15.) N15. room 101. Quantum.

Zoom Meeting:  https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/93615526968?pwd=Ct5B3XyvNeUM4zxnLoUJCHTahk0HLv.1

Meeting ID: 936 1552 6968
Passcode: 431804

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Best regards,