The Mental Representation of Human Action

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Science
• Philosophy of Mind
• Computational Neuroscience

Background:

• Moral cognition theories often view intuitions as computational outputs from mental representations of actions.
• Structured representations of human action are key to understanding moral decision-making.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce "act trees" as a tool for presenting hypotheses about mental representations of action.
• To develop and validate a methodology using linguistic probes to test these hypotheses.
• To explore and refine models of human action representation in moral cognition.

Main Methods:

• Development of "act trees" to diagram hypotheses about mental representations of action.
• Utilizing linguistic probes to empirically test theories embodied in act trees.
• Validation through studies on moral dilemmas and exploration of unexpected findings.

Main Results:

• The act tree methodology successfully validated a hypothesis about representing moral dilemmas.
• The method identified surprising findings, prompting further investigation into action representation.
• Application to a new case settled debates regarding mental action representation.

Conclusions:

• Act trees provide a clear and testable framework for theories of moral cognition.
• The linguistic probe methodology effectively captures mental representations of human action.
• Act trees have broad applicability across disciplines studying complex action representations.