Help or hinder: Bayesian models of social goal inference
Everyday social interactions are heavily influenced by our snap judgments about others’ goals. Even young infants can infer the goals of intentional agents from observing how they interact with objects and other agents in their environment: e.g., that one agent is ‘helping’ or ‘hindering’ another...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
| Published: |
Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation
2011
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/61347 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1925-2035 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9773-7871 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7870-4487 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1722-2382 |
| Summary: | Everyday social interactions are heavily influenced by our snap judgments about
others’ goals. Even young infants can infer the goals of intentional agents from
observing how they interact with objects and other agents in their environment:
e.g., that one agent is ‘helping’ or ‘hindering’ another’s attempt to get up a hill
or open a box. We propose a model for how people can infer these social goals
from actions, based on inverse planning in multiagent Markov decision problems
(MDPs). The model infers the goal most likely to be driving an agent’s behavior
by assuming the agent acts approximately rationally given environmental constraints
and its model of other agents present. We also present behavioral evidence
in support of this model over a simpler, perceptual cue-based alternative. |
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