Incremental Learning of Mental Models for Behavior Understanding

Humans are inherently social beings. Starting from a very young age, they quickly become increasingly more competent at inferring other's intentions from their behavior (Wellman & Liu 2004). This represents a crucial skill, as inferring other's intention allows cooperation without explicit verbal communication as well as preparing for the next likely actions of those around. What is even more impressive is that humans are capable of inferring reasons for seemingly suboptimal behavior, allowing them to collect much more information about the agent they are observing as well as the situation that agent is currently in. This is possible because they are assuming that other humans are rational agents, meaning that their actions should serve a purpose, it might just be that they cannot immediately understand this purpose. Children can use this additional information to learn more about the world around them (Liu et al. 2017).