Designing Minds: Formal Models of Cognitive Systems

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Natural selection creates machines that are improbably good at solving reproductive problems. Knowledge of the problems recurrently faced by human ancestors can therefore give psychologists useful clues as to the likely design features of the mind. But how exactly does one do this psychological reverse engineering? That is, given a problem, how can one go about identifying what a good solution would look like? Topics will include basic decision theory, evolutionary game theory, signaling theory, reinforcement learning, Bayesian reasoning, and other approaches. Students will learn the basic logic of these approaches, discuss applications to psychology, and use these approaches to generate novel hypotheses.