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AAAI-FSS 2021: Computational Theory of Mind for Human-Machine Teams pp 3–20Cite as

Operationalizing Theories of Theory of Mind: A Survey

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13775))

Abstract

Human social interaction hinges on the ability to interpret and predict the actions of others. The most valuable explanatory variable of these actions, more important than environmental or social factors, is the one that we do not have direct access to: the mind. This lack of access leaves us to impute the mental states—beliefs, desires, emotions, intentions, etc.—of others before we can explain their behaviors. Studying our ability to do so, our Theory of Mind, has long been the province of psychologists and philosophers. Computational scientists are increasingly joining this research space as they strive to imbue artificial intelligences with human-like characteristics. We provide a high-level review of Theory of Mind research across several domains, with the goal of mapping between theory and recursive agent models. We illustrate this mapping using a specific recursive agent architecture, PsychSim, and discuss how it addresses many of the open issues in Theory of Mind research by enforcing a set of minimal requirements.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This name is somewhat fraught due to its implication that the development of an explicit theory is part of the underlying cognitive process. Adding to the confusion, cognitive and computational scientists often refer to how researchers have a theory of mind about how the mind works [59]. We adopt it, nevertheless, due to its universal recognition.

  2. 2.

    The false belief task has proven extremely productive for the scientific community. Review of experimental methods is not in the scope of this paper, however it is worth noting that the false belief task and the empirical designs that followed in its footsteps likely have numerous flaws [5, 38, 67, 80].

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Acknowledgements

Part of the effort depicted is sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under contract number W911NF2010011, and that the content of the information does not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the Government or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and no official endorsements should be inferred.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Computer Science Department, Los Angeles, USA

    David V. Pynadath

  2. USC Institute for Creative Technologies, Los Angeles, USA

    Nikolos Gurney, Volkan Ustun & David V. Pynadath

  3. Northeastern University Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Boston, USA

    Stacy Marsella

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  1. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Nikolos Gurney

  2. University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA

    Gita Sukthankar

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Gurney, N., Marsella, S., Ustun, V., Pynadath, D.V. (2022). Operationalizing Theories of Theory of Mind: A Survey. In: Gurney, N., Sukthankar, G. (eds) Computational Theory of Mind for Human-Machine Teams. AAAI-FSS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13775. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21671-8_1

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