Noah Goodman - Social cognition via nested conditioning

Social cognition, reasoning about the mental states of other people, is a central obsession of human life. I will describe an approach to modeling social cognition as nested probabilistic conditioning. I will start by discussing learning from other people's actions, both passively observed and directed pedagogy. Then I'll discuss language understanding, in which the conditioning becomes recursive. I will particularly explore the role of knowledge, noise, and goals in language understanding.