The intentional stance as structure learning: a computational perspective on mindreading

Recent theories of mindreading explain the recognition of action, intention, and belief of other agents in terms of generative architectures that model the causal relations between observables (e.g., observed movements) and their hidden causes (e.g., action goals and beliefs). Two kinds of probabilistic generative schemes have been proposed in cognitive science and robotics that link to a "theory theory" and "simulation theory" of mindreading, respectively. The former compares perceived actions to optimal plans derived from rationality principles and conceptual theories of others' minds. The latter reuses one's own internal (inverse and forward) models for action execution to perform a look…