Though the existence of free will seems to be a background assumption in Western life, very little research has examined the belief, and the handful of studies that have done so suggest only a modest endorsement and unclear relationships to other variables. However, methodological flaws in the earlier studies likely produced an underestimation of the strength of the belief among the general pop...

The area of belief revision studies how a rational agent may incorporate new information about a domain into its belief corpus. An agent is characterized by a belief stateK, and receives a new item of information α which is to be included among its set of beliefs. Revision then is a function from a belief state and a formula to a new belief state. We propose here a more general framework for be...

Understanding the operating characteristics of theory of mind is essential for understanding how beliefs, desires, and other mental states are inferred, and for understanding the role such inferences could play in other cognitive processes. We present the first investigation of the automaticity of belief reasoning. In an incidental false-belief task, adult subjects responded more slowly to unex...

Novel conditions are derived that guarantee convergence of the Sum-Product algorithm (also known as Loopy Belief Propagation or simply Belief Propagation) to a unique fixed point, irrespective of the initial messages, for parallel (synchronous) updates. The computational complexity of the conditions is polynomial in the number of variables. In contrast with previously existing conditions, our r...