Dear all,
Please join us tomorrow (in Nador 15, room 103!) for the CEU Department of
Cognitive Science talk by:
*Julian Jara-Ettinger (MIT)*
*Date: *Wednesday, July 19th, 2017 – 17:00-18:30
*Host:* Gergo Csibra
*Location - CHANGED:* Nador 15, Room 103.
*The inner life of goals: costs, rewards, and commonsense psychology*
By kindergarten, our knowledge of agents has unfolded into a powerful
intuitive theory that enables us to thrive in our social world. In this
talk I will propose that children build their commonsense psychology around
a basic assumption that agents choose goals and actions by quantifying,
comparing, and maximizing utilities. This naïve utility calculus captures
much of the rich social reasoning we engage in from early childhood. I
explore this theory in a series of experiments looking at children's
ability to infer costs and rewards given partial information, their
reasoning about knowledgeable versus ignorant agents, their ability to
interpret ambiguous utterances, and their reasoning about the moral status
of agents. Moreover, a formal model of this theory, embedded in a Bayesian
framework, predicts with quantitative accuracy how humans make cost and
reward attributions. The theory also offers insights into a range of other
phenomena in commonsense psychology that, on the surface, do not appear to
involve utility maximization.
See more at:
http://web.mit.edu/jjara/www/
We look forward to seeing you there!
Cognitive Science Events at CEU:
http://cognitivescience.ceu.edu/events
--
Katarina Begus
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow
Cognitive Development Center
Central European University
Budapest, Hungary
+36 1 327 3000 / 2777
https://cognitivescience.ceu.edu/people/katarina-begus
______________________________________________
Subscribe by sending an empty mail to talks-subscribe(a)cogsci.ceu.edu
Unsubscribe by sending an empty mail to talks-unsubscribe(a)cogsci.ceu.edu