Action understanding as inverse planning
Open accessAbstract
Humans are adept at inferring the mental states underlying other agents' actions, such as goals, beliefs, desires, emotions and other thoughts. We propose a computational framework based on Bayesian inverse planning for modeling human action understanding. The framework represents an intuitive theory of intentional agents' behavior based on the principle of rationality: the expectation that agents will plan approximately rationally to achieve their goals, given their beliefs about the world. The mental states that caused an agent's behavior are inferred by inverting this model of rational planning using Bayesian inference, integrating the likelihood of the observed actions with the prior over mental states. This approach formalizes in precise probabilistic terms the essence of previous qualitative approaches to action understanding based on an "intentional stance" [Dennett, D. C. (1987). The intentional stance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press] or a "teleological stance" [Gergely, G., Nádasdy, Z., Csibra, G., & Biró, S. (1995). Taking the intentional stance at 12 months of age. Cognition, 56, 165-193]. In three psychophysical experiments using animated stimuli of agents moving in simple mazes, we assess how well different inverse planning models based on different goal priors can predict human goal inferences. The results provide quantitative evidence for an approximately rational inference mechanism in human goal inference within our simplified stimulus paradigm, and for the flexibl…
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- Authors
- Baker, C. L., Saxe, R., & Tenenbaum, J. B.
- Affiliations
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
- Corresponding author
- Baker, Chris L.
- Venue
- Cognition
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2009-12
- Volume
- 113
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 329-349
- ISSN
- 0010-0277 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2151516755
- Cited by
- 920
- References
- 10
- Citations by year
- 2026: 47 · 2025: 47 · 2024: 53 · 2023: 98 · 2022: 51 · 2021: 83 · 2020: 79 · 2019: 90 · 2018: 58 · 2017: 68 · 2016: 37 · 2015: 42 · 2014: 40 · 2013: 42 · 2012: 34
- FWCI
- 50.70
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- hdl.handle.net
- Licence
- cc-by-nc-sa
- www.elsevier.com/tdm/userlicense/1.0/ (tdm)
- Locations
- Cognition (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-sa)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Child and Animal Learning Development
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Action Observation and Synchronization
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Social Robot Interaction and HRI
- Keywords
- action understanding, inverse treatment planning, Bayesian inference, goal inference, mental state inference, intentional stance, rational planning, goal representation, animated agents
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Attention, Cognition, Female, Games, Experimental, Goals, Humans, Male, Models, Psychological, Reinforcement, Psychology, Social Perception, Space Perception, Spatial Behavior, Thinking, Intention, Theory of Mind
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