Chris L. Baker

Research interests

I build computational models of social cognition: adults' (and children's) reasoning and behavior during social interaction. In particular, I study theory of mind: our knowledge about the thoughts and mental states of others, such as beliefs, desires and emotions. Much of what we know about other people's thoughts and minds, we must infer, based on observations of their behavior in various contexts. My research has focused on how people make these inferences using a process called inverse planning. Inverse planning assumes that people tend to act rationally to achieve their goals, given an environmental and social context. In other words, we expect others to behave reasonably, sensibly, or at least somewhat intelligently to achieve their desires, given their beliefs about how this may best be done. Inverse planning then uses Bayesian inference, a powerful framework for reasoning under uncertainty, to infer the goals and beliefs underlying other people's observed behavior by inverting models of rational planning.

Papers

  1. Ullman, T.D., Baker, C.L., Macindoe, O., Evans, O., Goodman, N.D., & Tenenbaum, J.B. Help or hinder: Bayesian models of social goal inference. NIPS 2009, to appear.
  2. Baker, C.L., Saxe, R., & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2009). Action Understanding as Inverse Planning. Cognition, 113, 329-349. [Supplementary material].
  3. Goodman, N.D., Baker, C.L., & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2009). Cause and Intent: Social Reasoning in Causal Learning. In Proceedings of the Thirty-First Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2759-2764).
  4. Warner, R.E., Shafto, P., Baker, C.L., & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2009). Abstract Knowledge Guides Search and Prediction in Novel Situations. In Proceedings of the Thirty-First Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 869-874).
  5. Baker, C.L., Goodman, N.D., & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2008). Theory-based Social Goal Inference. In Proceedings of the Thirtieth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1447-1452).
  6. Baker, C.L., Tenenbaum, J.B., & Saxe, R.R. (2007). Goal Inference as Inverse Planning. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 779-784).
  7. Goodman, N.D., Baker, C.L., Bonawitz, E.B., Mansinghka, V.K., Gopnik, A., Wellman, H., Schulz, L., & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2006). Intuitive Theories of Mind: A Rational Approach to False Belief. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1382-1387).
  8. Baker, C.L., Tenenbaum, J.B., & Saxe, R.R. (2006). Bayesian Models of Human Action Understanding. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (Vol. 18, pp. 99-106). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  9. Shon, A.P., Grimes, D.B., Baker, C.L., Hoffman, M.W., Zhao, S., & Rao, R.P.N. (2005). Probabilistic Gaze Imitation and Saliency Learning in a Robotic Head. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (pp. 2876-2881).
  10. Shon, A.P., Grimes, D.B., Baker, C.L., & Rao, R.P.N. (2004). A Probabilistic Framework for Model-Based Imitation Learning. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1237-1242).

Selected Abstracts

  1. Baker, C.L., Goodman, N.D., & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2008). How People Understand and Learn From The Goal-Directed Actions of Other Agents. Poster presented at Psychonomics 2008.
  2. Baker, C.L., & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2007). Action Understanding as Inverse Probabilistic Planning. Talk presented at MathPsych 2007.
  3. Baker, C.L., Tenenbaum, J.B., & Saxe, R.R. (2007). Goal Inference as Inverse Planning. MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) Research Abstract.

Funding

Research funded by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and previously by the Department of Homeland Security Fellowship.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences