Name: Tiffany Nguyen 

Master's Thesis Proposal Meeting

Date: Friday, September 3, 2021

Time: 12:00 PM

Location: https://bluejeans.com/5732089742

Advisor: Eric Schumacher, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)

Thesis Committee Members:

Meghan Meyer, Ph.D. (Dartmouth)

Paul Verhaeghen, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)
Eric Schumacher, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)

Title: Intentional Stance Primacy in Hierarchal Task Representations for Social Learning  

Abstract:

Human behavior is complex yet much of psychology assumes it is a collection of learned stimulus-responses associations. Rather than reacting to an existing “habitat” like animals however, we can reflect on how our world has limitations that inhibit our freedoms, or possible interactions with the world and people. That reflection leads us to engage in social learning and set goals that collectively transform nature to expand our freedoms. This reoccurs in a continuous cycle. In parallel to this understanding of the world’s interaction with human cognition, empirical research has shifted towards accounting for human behavior through hierarchical task set representations that can encode abstract relationships across sets of stimuli and responses. Hierarchical task representations have shown that the magnitude of asymmetric switch cost patterns could be partially attributed to task similarity, where tasks that share common cognitive processes would have a smaller switch cost. However, it is unclear if this task similarity effect generalizes to abstract features, such as social content that activates the intentional stance. Given that humans have evolved to be more dependent on social learning, the intentional stance has been proposed to be an adaptive strategy or specifically a form of biologically primary knowledge that allows for acquisition of secondary social skills. Whether the similarity effect generalizes to social intention and whether the intentional stance constitutes as primary knowledge may expand our understanding of task representations to one that is consistent with a larger theoretical framework of human behavior across evolutionary, biological, psychological, and the social sciences.