Research interests
I build computational models of social cognition: people'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 minds, we infer, based on observations of other people's behavior in some context. 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 the constraints of the context, and uses Bayesian inference to invert this model to identify the goals and beliefs that underlie other people's behavior.
My collaborators and I have applied these principles to model how adults and children infer the goals of others, how people use inferred goals to predict future behavior, how children learn to pass the "false belief task", and most recently, how people make inferences about agents' goals toward each other from observations of social interaction.
Papers
- Baker, C.L., Tenenbaum, J.B. & Saxe, R.R. (under revision). Action Understanding as Inverse Planning.
- Baker, C.L., Goodman, N.D., & Tenenbaum, J.B. (to appear). Theory-based Social Goal Inference. In Proceedings of the Thirtieth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
- 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.
- 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.
- Baker, C.L., Tenenbaum, J.B., & Saxe, R.R. (2006). Bayesian Models of Human Action Understanding. In Y. Weiss, B. Scholkopf, & J. Platt (Eds.). In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (Vol. 18, pp. 99-106). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- 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).
- 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.
Abstracts
- Baker, C.L. & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2007). Action Understanding as Inverse Probabilistic Planning. MathPsych 2007.
- Baker, C.L., Tenenbaum, J.B. & Saxe, R.R. (2007). Goal Inference as Inverse Planning. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) Research Abstract.
