SSP Forum: Tobias Gerstenberg on counterfactual cognition

The
Symbolic Systems Forum
(community sessions of SYMSYS 280 - Symbolic Systems Research Seminar)
presents

Going beyond the here and now: Counterfactual simulation in human cognition

Tobias Gerstenberg
Psychology Department

Monday, April 29, 2024
12;30-1:20 pm PT
Margaret Jacks Hall (Bldg. 460), Room 126
In-person event, not recorded
(see below for entry instructions if you are not an active Stanford affiliate)

Note: Lunch is provided, if pre-ordered, only for members of SYMSYS 280, but others are welcome to bring a lunch and eat during the presentation.

ABSTRACT:

As humans, we spend much of our time going beyond the here and now. We dwell on the past, long for the future, and ponder how things could have turned out differently. The capacity to simulate counterfactual possibilities is an important feat of human cognition. Counterfactuals are critical for how people make causal judgments, how they explain what happened, and how they hold others responsible for their actions. To simulate counterfactuals, we need three key ingredients: a generative mental model of the world, the ability to perform counterfactual interventions on that model, and the capacity to simulate what the consequences of these interventions would have been. I introduce the counterfactual simulation model (CSM) which incorporates these ingredients and applies them to capturing people's intuitive understanding of the physical and psychological world. In the physical domain, the CSM predicts people's causal judgments about a variety of physical scenes, including dynamic collision events, complex situations that involve multiple causes, omissions as causes, and causal responsibility for a system's stability. It also captures the cognitive processes that underlie these judgments as revealed by spontaneous eye-movements. People not only look at what actually happened; they spontaneously simulate whether the outcome in the counterfactual situation would have been different. In the psychological domain, the CSM explains what agent's actions made a difference to the outcome, whether one agent helped or hindered another, and how responsible different agents are for a joint outcome. Together these results demonstrate that much of human thought can be understood as cognitive operations over mental models, and that counterfactual simulation, in particular, plays a critical role in how humans make sense of the world.

NOTES ON ENTRY TO THE MEETING ROOM:

Entry to the building is open to anyone with an active Stanford ID via the card readers next to each door. If you do not have a Stanford ID, you can gain entry between 12:15 and 12:30pm ONLY by knocking on the exterior windows of room 126. These windows are to the left of the west side exterior door on the first floor of Margaret Jacks Hall, which faces the back east side of Building 420. Please do not knock on these windows after 12:30pm when the talk has started. We will not be able to come out and open the door for you at that point.