Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper presents a theory of motivational analysis, the construction of volitional explanations to describe the planning behavior of agents. We discuss both the content of such explanations, as well as the process by which an understander builds the explanations. Explanations are constructed from decision models, which describe the planning process that an agent goes through when considering whether to perform an action. Decision models are represented as explanation patterns, which are standard patterns of causality based on previous experiences of the understander. We discuss the nature of explanation patterns, their use in representing decision models, and the process by which they are retrieved, used and evaluated.