About

The Computation and Decision-Making Lab, led by Dr. Mark Ho, investigates the computational principles that underlie cognition, decision-making, and social interaction in humans and intelligent machines. We take an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on ideas and methods from cognitive science, social psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence to answer questions such as:

How do people teach and communicate?
How do groups coordinate their thoughts, plans, and actions to achieve joint goals?
How do people plan and learn in complex, uncertain environments?
How do cognitive biases emerge from the avoidance of mental effort?
How can we align interactive machine learning systems with human cognition and values?

Representative Papers

For a complete list, see Papers

People construct simplified mental representations to plan

Mark K. Ho, David Abel, Carlos G. Correa, Michael L. Littman, Jonathan D. Cohen, Thomas L. Griffiths

Nature (2022).

This paper proposes a theory of value-guided construals: simplified but useful representations that people construct when planning. Also see the Nature's Behind the Paper blog post and arXiv version.

Planning with Theory of Mind

Mark K. Ho, Rebecca Saxe, Fiery Cushman

Trends in Cognitive Sciences (2022).

This paper examines how planning processes shape Theory of Mind, the human capacity to reason about others' mental states.

Cognitive science as a source of forward and inverse models of human decisions for robotics and control

Mark K. Ho, Thomas L. Griffiths

Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems (2022).

This paper provides an overview of computational cognitive science for artificial intelligence, control, and robotics.