ThinkAhead (DUS.AD016.106)

Thematic area

Social sciences and humanities, cultural heritage

Project area

Structure responsible for the research project

Institute of cognitive sciences and technologies (ISTC)

Project manager

GIOVANNI PEZZULO
Phone number: 0644595206
Email: giovanni.pezzulo@istc.cnr.it

Abstract

Humans have an impressive ability to form action plans in several domains of cognition; for example, planning routes to goals in spatial navigation, or the necessary steps to assemble complex objects, alone or together with other persons. However, the computations that underlie human individual and social planning remain largely unknown. This proposal aims to explain the ways humans face three key forms of uncertainty arising in planning domains; namely, uncertainty about task structure, action sequences, and the contributions of self and others to cooperative plans. To this aim, it advances a radically new theory about human planning, within a Bayesian approach that has been successfully adopted to explain uncertainties arising in perception and control. The theory under scrutiny is that humans plan using probabilistic inference based on hierarchical predictive codes (HPCs): compressed information or task abstractions that afford a powerful form of uncertainty-minimization, by highlighting salient junction points of the problem at hand, analogous to saliency maps for visual search.

Goals

il progetto thinkahead si propone di studiare come pianifichiamo in situazioni complesse, singolarmente o in piccoli gruppi. A questo scopo, il progetto realizzera' modelli computazionali che incorporano la teoria del cervello predittivo e li estendono a situazioni di planning gerarchico; e validera' le predizioni dei modelli con esperimenti su soggetti umani adulti

Start date of activity

01/01/2020

Keywords

predizione, pianificazione, modelli computazionali

Last update: 21/06/2025