The inner life of goals : costs, rewards, and commonsense psychology
Name
967336542-MIT.pdf
Description
Full printable version
Size
13.48 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
714f83b18d9142fc4cd5b0b87f919218
Author(s)
Jara-Ettinger, Jose Julian
Advisor(s)
Laura E. Schulz.
Date Issued
2016
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
By kindergarten, our knowledge of agents has unfolded into a powerful intuitive theory that enables us to thrive in our social world. In this thesis I propose that children build their commonsense psychology around a basic assumption that agents choose goals and actions by quantifying, comparing, and maximizing utilities. This naive utility calculus generalizes infants' expectation that agents navigate efficiently, and 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, 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.
Description
Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, 2016.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 131-143).
Subjects
Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.
Persistent DSpace Link
