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