Animacy and ToM

Contributor: Lifeng Fan

Reading list

survey/review/perspective paper Encyclopedia book chapter

Required - Animacy

• Perceptual causality and animacy, TiCS 2001
• An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior, The American Journal of Psychology 1944
• The psychophysics of chasing: A case study in the perception of animacy, Cognitive Psychology 2009
• A unified psychological space for human perception of physical and social events, Cognitive Psychology 2021

Required - Theory of Mind (ToM)

• Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis, Science 2007
• How Sophisticated Is Infants’ Theory of Mind?, The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Development (2022)
• Social cognition and metacognition in great apes: a theory, Animal Cognition 2022
• Machine Theory of Mind, ICML 2018

Optional - Psychological and Phylosophical Studies on Animacy

• Animal Consciousness
• Infants’ concept of animacy, Cognitive Development 1996
• The Wolfpack Effect: Perception of Animacy Irresistibly Influences Interactive Behavior, Psychological Science 2010
• Perception of animacy from the motion of a single object, Perception 2000
• What are the underlying units of perceived animacy? Chasing detection is intrinsically object-based, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 2017

Optional - Animacy Modeling

• Perception of Human Interaction Based on Motion Trajectories: From Aerial Videos to Decontextualized Animations, TopiCS 2017
• Adventures in Flatland: Perceiving Social Interactions Under Physical Dynamics, CogSci 2020

Optional - Philosophical Studies on ToM

• The Computational Theory of Mind
• Modularity of Mind
• Folk Psychology as Mental Simulation
• The Mind/Brain Identity Theory
• Evolution in Mind: Evolutionary Dynamics, Cognitive Processes, and Bayesian Inference, TiCS 2007

Optional - False Belief

• Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children’s understanding of deception, Cognition 1983
• Do 15-Month-Old Infants Understand False Beliefs?, Science 2005
• Action Anticipation Through Attribution of False Belief by 2-Year-Olds, Psychological Science 2007
• Eighteen-month-old infants show false belief understanding in an active helping paradigm, Cognition 2009
• From infants’ to children’s appreciation of belief, TiCS 2012
• Three-year-olds’ difficulty with false belief: The case for a conceptual deficit, British Journal of Developmental Psychology 1987
• Making sense of early false-belief understanding, TiCS 2014
• Identity: Key to children’s understanding of belief, Science 2011

Optional - ToM in Robotics

• A Bayesian Theory of Mind Approach to Nonverbal Communication, HRI 2019
• Cognitive Science as a Source of Forward and Inverse Models of Human Decisions for Robotics and Control, Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems 2021
• An Embodied Cognition Approach to Mindreading Skills for Socially Intelligent Robots, IJRR 2009
• Joint Inference of States, Robot Knowledge, and Human (False-)Beliefs, ICRA 2020
• Implementing Theory of Mind on a Robot Using Dynamic Epistemic Logic, IJCAI 2020

Optional - ToM in Games

• The Hanabi challenge: A new frontier for AI research, Artificial Intelligence 2020
• Coordinate to cooperate or compete: Abstract goals and joint intentions in social interaction, CogSci 2016
• Recursive Mentalizing and Common Knowledge in the Bystander Effect, JEPG 2016
• Recursively modeling other agents for decision making: A research perspective, Artificial Intelligence 2020
• Communication in Action: Planning and Interpreting Communicative Demonstrations, JEPG 2021

Optional - Joint Attention

• The coordination of attention and action in great apes and humans, Philos. Trans. R. Soc. B 2021
• Joint attention and early language, Child Development 1986
• Infants’ contribution to the achievement of joint reference, Child Development 1991
• Early referential understanding: Infants’ ability to recognize referential acts for what they are, Developmental Psychology 1993
• The social-pragmatic theory of word learning, Pragmatics 2000
• Two-year-olds exclude novel objects as potential referents of novel words based on pragmatics, Cognition 2009
• Embodied attention and word learning by toddlers, Cognition 2012
• Perceiving intentions and learning words in the second year of life, Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development (2001)

Optional - Joint Goals and Commitments

• Chimpanzee helping in collaborative and noncollaborative contexts, Animal Behaviour 2010
• Children’s Developing Commitments to Joint Goals, Child Development 2011
• Three-Year-Olds’ Understanding of the Consequences of Joint Commitments, PLoS One 2013
• 3- and 5-Year-Old Children’s Adherence to Explicit and Implicit Joint Commitments, Developmental Psychology 2018
• Every product needs a process: unpacking joint commitment as a process across species, Philos. Trans. R. Soc. B 2021

Essay

1. What do you think are the most important factors that drive human’s perception of animacy? Is it a bottom-up, or a top-down process, or both? Can a purely data-driven model solve the problem? Why?
2. There have been many debates over Theory of Mind for a long time, such as the mind modularity problem, the mind body problem. Pick a debate that you are most interested in, and give your own arguments for it.
3. Many studies model mind inference between agents in a recursive way. However, obviously we humans don’t do that infinitely recursive mind inference in practice. What’s the problem with the recursive modeling? What do you think might be a better model for the underlying mental mechanism? How do we humans build common mind during interaction?
4. Can humans build a human brain? What’s the biggest problem and hardest challenges now? Show your opinion and analysis.