2026-09-18T19:33:24Zhttps://dspace.mit.edu/server/oai/requestoai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/1064332026-06-16T18:14:16Zcom_1721.1_7582com_1721.1_7581col_1721.1_131022
Laura E. Schulz.
Jara-Ettinger, Jose Julian
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
2017-01-12T18:33:18Z
2017-01-12T18:33:18Z
2016
2016
http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/106433
967336542
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).
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.
by Jose Julian Jara-Ettinger.
Ph.D.
143 pages
eng
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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.
http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582
Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
The inner life of goals : costs, rewards, and commonsense psychology
Thesis
application/pdf
Publication
unknown
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<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.</Abstract>
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