Contextualizing predictive minds.

The structure of human memory seems to be optimized for efficient prediction, planning, and behavior. We propose that these capacities rely on a tripartite structure of memory that includes concepts, events, and contexts-three layers that constitute the mental world model. We suggest that the mechanism that critically increases adaptivity and flexibility is the tendency to contextualize.

Active Iterative Social Inference in Multi-Trial Signaling Games.

Human behavioral choices can reveal intrinsic and extrinsic decision-influencing factors. We investigate the inference of choice priors in situations of referential ambiguity. In particular, we use the scenario of signaling games and investigate to which extent study participants profit from actively engaging in the task.

Learning about others: Modeling social inference through ambiguity resolution.

Bayesian accounts of social cognition successfully model the human ability to infer goals and intentions of others on the basis of their behavior. In this paper, we extend this paradigm to the analysis of ambiguity resolution during brief communicative exchanges. In a reference game experimental setup, we observed that participants were able to infer listeners' preferences when analyzing their choice of object given referential ambiguity.

Event-Predictive Cognition: A Root for Conceptual Human Thought.

Our minds navigate a continuous stream of sensorimotor experiences, selectively compressing them into events. Event-predictive encodings and processing abilities have evolved because they mirror interactions between agents and objects-and the pursuance or avoidance of critical interactions lies at the heart of survival and reproduction. However, it appears that these abilities have evolved not only to pursue live-enhancing events and to avoid threatening events, but also to distinguish food sources, to produce and to use tools, to cooperate, and to communicate.