Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When observing others’ behavior, people use Theory of Mind to infer unobservable beliefs, desires, and intentions. And when showing what activity one is doing, people will modify their behavior in order to facilitate more accurate interpretation and learning by an observer. Here, we present a novel model of how demonstrators act and observers interpret demonstrations corresponding to different levels of recursive social reasoning (i.e. a cognitive hierarchy) grounded in Theory of Mind. Our model can explain how demonstrators show others how to per- form a task and makes predictions about how sophisticated ob- servers can reason about communicative intentions. Addition- ally, we report an experiment that tests (1) how well an ob- server can learn from demonstrations that were produced with the intent to communicate, and (2) how an observer’s interpre- tation of demonstrations influences their judgments.