{"pk":28503,"title":"Detecting social transmission in the design of artifacts via inverse planning","subtitle":null,"abstract":"How do people use human-made objects (artifacts) to learn\nabout the people and actions that created them? We test the\nrichness of people’s reasoning in this domain, focusing on the\ntask of judging whether social transmission has occurred (i.e.\nwhether one person copied another). We develop a formal\nmodel of this reasoning process as a form of rational inverse\nplanning, which predicts that rather than solely focusing on\nartifacts’ similarity to judge whether copying occurred, people\nshould also take into account availability constraints (the\nmaterials available), and functional constraints (which\nmaterials work). Using an artifact-building task where two\ncharacters build tools to solve a puzzle box, we find that this\ninverse planning model predicts trial-by-trial judgments,\nwhereas simpler models that do not consider availability or\nfunctional constraints do not. This suggests people use a\nprocess like inverse planning to make flexible inferences from\nartifacts’ features about the source of design ideas.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"social cognition; Bayesian inference; explanation;\nsocial transmission; imitation; artifact; design; inverse\nplanning"}],"section":"Papers with Oral Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8f60q9xb","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Ethan","middle_name":"","last_name":"Hurwitz","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, San Diego","department":""},{"first_name":"Timothy","middle_name":"F.","last_name":"Brady","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, San Diego","department":""},{"first_name":"Adena","middle_name":"","last_name":"Schachner","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, San Diego","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2019-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28503/galley/18374/download/"}]}