This coming Thursday, Professor Rineke Verbrugge (Univ. Groningen) will give an ILLC lunch-seminar lecture.
Title: Reasoning about other minds: From logic to the lab.
Date and Time: Thursday, June 7th 2018, 12:00-13:45
Location: ILLC Common Room, F1.21, SP107
You are all invited to attend the lecture. After the lecture the ILLC will offer a sandwich-lunch during which the discussion with the speaker can continue. In connection with catering, please send an email to Patty den Enting (p.d.denenting@uva.nl) by Tuesday 18 hrs if you expect to attend the lecture and lunch.
Abstract: This lecture focuses on my research around recursive reasoning about other minds. People often reason about other people’s beliefs, knowledge, goals and plans, in order to understand and predict their behavior. They can make first-order mental state attributions such as “Bob believes that I wrote a novel under pseudonym” but also second-order attributions such as “He thinks that I will capture his queen in my next turn”. Dynamic epistemic logic has shown to be a very useful tool to model higher-level reasoning about knowledge. However, it is idealized and does not exactly fit human reasoning about other minds. I will discuss the following questions: Why is second-order theory of mind so difficult to apply for adults, let alone higher levels? Where does the difficulty reside? Why has higher-order social reasoning evolved in the first place, if it is so difficult? Can we support people in reasoning about the interests and higher-order beliefs of another person, leading to win-win solutions in negotiations? To investigate these questions, I move between logic and the lab, combining epistemic logic, computational cognitive models, agent-based models, and empirical research.