Speaker: Anthia Solaki
Date and Time: Thursday, May 7th 2020, 16:30-18:00, Amsterdam time.
Venue: online
Title: A logical formalisation of False Belief Tasks (joint work with Fernando Velázquez-Quesada)
Abstract.
Theory of Mind, the cognitive capacity to attribute internal mental states to oneself and others, is a crucial component of social skills. Its formal study has become important, witness recent research on reasoning and information update by intelligent agents, and some proposals for its formal modelling have put forward settings based on Epistemic Logic (EL). Still, due to intrinsic idealisations, it is questionable whether EL can be used to model the high-order cognition of “real” agents. We propose a mental attribution modelling logical framework based on agents’ temporal visibility, that is more in-line with findings in cognitive science and suitable to model well-known False-Belief tasks. We discuss some of its technical features and argue on why it does justice to empirical observations. We finally extend the temporal visibility models to capture that communication (next to observation) comes into play when attributing beliefs to others. We illustrate the workings of the new system in the modelling of more complicated False-Belief tasks.
See here for the recording of the talk.