[ACT-R-users] PhD position available "Cognitive Systems in Interaction"

[Leendert van Maanen]

Dear all,

A PhD postition is now available at the Department of Artificial  
Intelligence, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Please forward  
this announcement to anyone who might be interested.

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PhD position Cognitive Systems in Interaction
The Vici project ‘Cognitive systems in interaction: Logical and  
computational models of higher-order social cognition’.
Software agents are capable of recursion in their social reasoning: A  
thinks about what B knows, about what B thinks that A knows, and so  
on. However, humans lose track of such reasoning after only two or  
three levels. If software agents work together with human teammates,  
they need to take into account the limits of their social cognition.  
In the Vici project, we investigate children's development and adults'  
limitations in applying higher-order reasoning, using a close-knit  
combination of empirical research and formal modeling. Whereas first- 
order social cognition has been intensely investigated, higher-order  
social cognition is far less well-understood. This project aims to  
apply improved understanding of higher-order social reasoning to  
design realistic logics, ready for implementation in systems  
supporting mixed human-computer teams.

The PhD project: Children developing higher-order social cognition.
Some social cognition tasks are done correctly at an early age, others  
take some years longer, while many adults never reliably learn complex  
higher-order tasks. The PhD candidate combines behavioral experiments  
with children and computational cognitive modelling in ACT-R to  
investigate the bottlenecks in moving from first-order social  
cognition to higher orders. On the basis of the theory and the  
modeling results, new ideas for experiments are developed so as to  
test predictions. Experiments with normally developing children (6-12  
years) help to investigate their reasoning strategies. Finally, the  
PhD candidate constructs a combined cognitive model of the development  
of higher-order social cognition.

For more information: http://www.academictransfer.org/00347-1007


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Leendert van Maanen
Artificial Intelligence
University of Groningen

P.O. Box 407
9700 AK Groningen
the Netherlands

+31 50 363 7603
leendert at ai.rug.nl
http://www.ai.rug.nl/~leendert