Reasoning about other minds:
Logical and cognitive perspectives


August 4-5 2014, Groningen


This workshop aims to shed light on models of social reasoning that take into account realistic resource bounds. People reason about other people`s mental states in order to understand and predict the others` behavior. This capability to reason about others` knowledge, beliefs and intentions is often referred to as `theory of mind'. Idealized rational agents are capable of recursion in their social reasoning, and can reason about phenomena like common knowledge. Such idealized social reasoning has been modeled by modal logics such as epistemic logic and BDI (belief, goal, intention) logics. However, in real-world situations, many people seem to lose track of such recursive social reasoning after only a few levels. Cognitive scientists build computational models of social reasoning, for example, recently an "inverse planning" model based on Bayesian inference frameworks has proven successful in modeling human inferences about the goals and beliefs underlying other people's observed behavior. The workshop provides a forum for researchers that attempt to analyze, understand and model how resource-bounded agents reason about other minds. The workshop is a follow-up on the workshop that was collocated with TARK 2011 in Groningen, see http://www.ai.rug.nl/conf/reasoningminds/

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
  • Logics modeling human social cognition;
  • Computational cognitive models of theory of mind;
  • Epistemic game theory;
  • Behavioral game theory;
  • Bounded rationality in epistemic game theory;
  • Relations between language and social cognition;
  • Models of the evolution of theory of mind;
  • Models of the development of theory of mind in children;
  • Models of the neural implementation of social cognition;
  • Bounded rationality in multi-agent systems;
  • Formal models of team reasoning;
  • Theory of mind in specific groups, e.g., persons with autism spectrum disorder;
  • Complexity measures for reasoning about other minds.