Dear all,

This coming Thursday we will have our next LIRa Session with Carlo Proietti at 16:00 hrs. In addition, we also encourage you to join the ILLC lunch-seminar with Professor Rineke Verbrugge (Univ. Groningen) at 12:00 hrs.

The details of the ILLC lunch-seminar and the LIRa Session follow below.

ILLC lunch-seminar Title: Reasoning about other minds: From logic to the lab

Date and Time: Thursday, June 7th 2018, 12:00-13:45

Location: ILLC Common Room, F1.21, SP107

You are all invited to attend the lecture. After the lecture the ILLC will offer a sandwich-lunch during which the discussion with the speaker can continue. In connection with catering, please send an email to Patty den Enting (p.d.denenting@uva.nl) by Tuesday 18 hrs if you expect to attend the lecture and lunch.

LIRa Session Title: Group Polarization and Abstract Argumentation

Date and Time: Thursday, June 7th 2018, 16:00-17:30

Location: ILLC, Room F1.15, SP107

The corresponding abstracts follow below.

Abstract ILLC lunch-seminar: This lecture focuses on my research around recursive reasoning about other minds. People often reason about other people’s beliefs, knowledge, goals and plans, in order to understand and predict their behavior. They can make first-order mental state attributions such as “Bob believes that I wrote a novel under pseudonym” but also second-order attributions such as “He thinks that I will capture his queen in my next turn”.  Dynamic epistemic logic has shown to be a very useful tool to model higher-level reasoning about knowledge. However, it is idealized and does not exactly fit human reasoning about other minds. I will discuss the following questions: Why is second-order theory of mind so difficult to apply for adults, let alone higher levels? Where does the difficulty reside? Why has higher-order social reasoning evolved in the first place, if it is so difficult? Can we support people in reasoning about the interests and higher-order beliefs of another person, leading to win-win solutions in negotiations? To investigate these questions, I move between logic and the lab, combining epistemic logic, computational cognitive models, agent-based models, and empirical research.

Abstract LIRa Session: Discussion often makes individuals more radical about their initial opinion. This phenomenon is known as Group-induced Attitude Polarization (Moscovici et al. 1969). A byproduct of it are bipolarization effects, where the distance between the opinions of two groups increases after discussion. A fine-grained analysis of the exchange of information among agents in a debate is key to understand how such dynamics unfold. I use Argumentation Graphs as a tool for encoding the information of agents in a debate. Measures of the degree of acceptability of an opinion in a graph are introduced to illustrate how polarization is induced by exchange of arguments among agents. I also show that different policies of information transmission and update have a decisive impact on polarization and bipolarization effects.

Hope to see you there!

The LIRa team