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From childhood, people routinely explain each other’s behav-ior in terms of inferred mental states, like beliefs and desires.In many cases, however, people can also infer the mental statesof agents whose behavior we cannot see, such as when we in-fer that someone was anxious upon encountering a chewed-uppencil, or that someone left in a hurry if they left the door open.Here we present a computational model of mental-state attri-bution that works by reconstructing the actions an agent took,based on the indirect evidence that revealed their presence. Ourmodel quantitatively fits participant judgments, outperforminga simple alternative cue-based account. Our results shed lighton how people infer mental states from minimal indirect evi-dence, and provides further support to the idea that human The-ory of Mind is instantiated as a probabilistic generative modelof how unobservable mental states produce observable action.

Designing artificial agents that can closely imitate humanbehavior, might influence humans in perceiving them asintentional agents. Nonetheless, the factors that are crucial foran artificial agent to be perceived as an animated andanthropomorphic being still need to be addressed. In the currentstudy, we investigated some of the factors that might affect theperception of a robot's behavior as human-like or intentional.To meet this aim, seventy-nine participants were exposed totwo different behaviors of a humanoid robot under twodifferent instructions. Before the experiment, participants'biases towards robotics as well as their personality traits wereassessed. Our results suggest that participants’ sensitivity tohuman-likeness relies more on their expectations rather than onperceptual cues.

Beyond an ability to represent other people’s mental states,people can also represent different types of minds, like those ofnewborn babies, pets, and even wildlife that we rarely interactwith. While past research has shown that people have a nu-anced understanding of how minds vary, little is known abouthow we infer what kind of mind different agents have. Here wepresent a computational model of mind attribution as Bayesianinference over a space of generative models. We tested ourmodel in a simple experiment where participants watched shortvideos in the style of Heider & Simmel, 1944, and had to in-fer the representations in the agent’s mind. We find that, fromjust a few seconds, people can make accurate inferences aboutagents’ mental capacities, suggesting that people can quicklyinfer an agent’s type of mind, based on how they interact withthe world and with others.

The ability to imagine alternative possibilities plays a crucialrole in everyday cognitive functioning beginning in earlychildhood. Across two studies, we ask whether individualdifferences in young children’s (Mean Age = 5.01; SD = 0.78Range = 2) fluency in generating alternative possibilitiesrelates to a particular type of social-cognitive counterfactualjudgment, namely children’s belief in the possibility to “actotherwise” when actions go against stated strong desires (i.e.“free will”). We found that the fluency of generating ideaswas a consistent individual difference that held regardless ofdomain. We also found that individual children’s fluencypredicted judgments of free will for themselves (Study 2) butnot for others (Study 1). Our findings raise new questionsabout how counterfactual thinking enables children toovercome psychological barriers to self-control, and howstimulating the imagination facilitates developing cognitionsthat rely on it.

The ability to infer other people’s emotions is an importantaspect of children’s social cognition. Here, we examinedwhether 4- to 6-year-olds use probability to infer otherpeople’s happiness. Children saw a scenario where a girlreceives two desired and two undesired gumballs from agumball machine and were asked to rate how the girl feelsabout this outcome. Children either saw the gumballs comefrom a machine that had mostly desired gumballs or amachine that had mostly undesired gumballs. Five- and 6-year-olds rated the girl as being happier when the gumballscame from a machine that had mostly undesired gumballs.Four-year-olds, on the other hand, rated the girl’s happinesssimilarly regardless of whether the machine held mostlydesired or undesired gumballs. These findings show that bythe age of 5, children use probability to infer happiness.Further, they demonstrate that children understand that ourhappiness with an outcome depends on whether a better orworse outcome was initially more likely.

This study explores the relationship between beliefs aboutself-control and the ability to exercise self-control in 4- to 6-year-old children. Sixty-eight children were asked a series ofquestions to gauge whether they believed that they couldfreely choose to act against their desires or inhibit themselvesfrom performing desired actions. Children were also asked toprovide qualitative explanations for why they could or couldnot exercise free will, and to complete two inhibitory controltasks: forbidden toy and day/night. Choice responses werenegatively correlated with performance on the forbidden toytask, when children performed that task first. There was also anegative correlation between a belief in an internal locus ofcontrol, and success on the forbidden toy measure. Refrainingfrom touching a forbidden toy appears to be correlated to lessbelief in free will. Though this may appear counter-intuitive,it is consistent with cross-cultural research.

People have a common-sense notion of intelligence and use itto evaluate decisions and decision-makers. One can attributeintelligence by evaluating the strategy or the outcome of agoal-directed agent. We propose a model of intelligence at-tribution, based on inverse planning in Partially ObservableMarkov Decision Processes (POMDPs) in a probabilistic envi-ronment, inferring the most likely planning parameters givenobserved actions. The model explains the agent’s decisionsby a combination of probabilistic planning, a softmax decisionnoise, prior knowledge about the world and forgetting, estimat-ing the agent’s intelligence by a proxy measure of efficientlyoptimising costs and rewards. Behavioural evidence from twoexperiments shows that people cluster into those who attributeintelligence to the strategy and those who attribute intelligenceto the outcome of the observed actions. People in the strat-egy cluster attribute more intelligence to decisions that min-imise the agent’s overall cost, even if the outcome is unlucky.People in the outcome cluster attribute intelligence to the out-come, judging low-cost outcomes as a sign of intelligence evenif the outcome is accidental and make neutral judgements be-fore they observe the result. Our model explains human in-telligence judgements better than perceptual cues such as thenumber of revisits or moves.

Despite its importance, human collective intelligence remainsenigmatic. We know what features are predictive of collectiveintelligence in human groups, but we do not understandthe specific mechanisms that lead to the emergence of this distributedinformation processing ability. In contrast, there isa well-developed literature of experiments that have exposedthe mechanisms of collective intelligence in nonhuman animalspecies. We adapt a recent experiment designed to studycollective sensing in groups of fish in order to better understandthe mechanisms that may underly the emergence of collectiveintelligence in human groups. We find that humans inour experiments act at a high level like fish but with two additionalbehaviors: independent exploration and targeted copying.These distinctively human activities may partially explainthe emergence of collective sensing in our task environment atgroup sizes and on times scales orders of magnitudes smallerthan were observed in fish.

Symbolic artifacts present a challenge to theories ofneurocognitive processing due to their dual nature: they areboth physical objects and vehicles of social meanings. Whiletheir physical properties can be read of the surface structure,the meaning of symbolic artifacts depends on theirembeddedness in cultural practices. In this study, participantsbuilt models of LEGO bricks to illustrate their understandingof abstract concepts. Subsequently, they were scanned withfMRI while presented to photographs of their own and others’models. When participants attended to the meaning of themodels, we observed activations associated with socialcognition and semantics. In contrast, when attending to thephysical properties, we observed activations related to objectrecognition and manipulation. Furthermore, when contrastingown and others’ models, we found activations in areasassociated with autobiographical memory and agency. Ourfindings support a view of symbolic artifacts as neurocognitivetrails of human social interactions.

The article emphasizes that modern researchers consider social anthropology to be a central social issue. Moral–and–ethical matters, in particular, of responsibility and obligingness of a social subject are covered. It is also noted that the existential–anthropological orientation of social cognition is a necessary «way» of penetrating into a specific sphere of interaction between social and individual being. The proportional issues of self–knowledge of society and self–knowledge of a person as a social subject are analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the major challenges faced by explanations of imitation is the "correspondence problem": how is an agent able to match its bodily expression to the observed bodily expression of another agent, especially when there is no possibility of external self-observation? Current theories only consider the possibility of an innate or acquired matching mechanism belonging to an isolated individual. In this paper we evaluate an alternative that situates the explanation of imitation in the inter-individual dynamics of the interaction process itself. We implemented a minimal model of two interacting agents based on a recent psychological study of imitative behavior during minimalist perceptual crossing. The agents cannot sense the configuration of their own body, and do not have access to other's body configuration, either. And yet surprisingly they are still capable of converging on matching bodily configurations. Analysis revealed that the agents solved this version of the correspondence problem in terms of collective properties of the interaction process. Contrary to the assumption that such properties merely serve as external input or scaffolding for individual mechanisms, it was found that the behavioral dynamics were distributed across the model as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We found that the way people looked at images was influenced by their belief that others were looking too. If participants believed that an unseen other person was also looking at what they could see, it shifted the balance of their gaze between negative and positive images. The direction of this shift depended upon whether participants thought that later they would be compared against the other person or would be collaborating with them. Changes in the social context influenced both gaze and memory processes, and were not due just to participants' belief that they are looking at the same images, but also to the belief that they are doing the same task. We believe that the phenomenon of joint perception reveals the pervasive and subtle effect of social context upon cognitive and perceptual processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]