Goals, as typically conceived in AI planning, provide an insufficient basis for choice of action, and hence are deficient as the sole expression of an agent’s objectives. Decision-theoretic utilities offer a more adequate basis, yet lack many of the computational advantages of goals. We provide a preferential semantics for goals that grounds them in decision theory and preserves the validity of...

Individuals’ motivational self-regulatory system is challenged as they cross the transition from school to work. Using data from a longitudinal study of participants approaching and crossing university graduation (n 1⁄4 140), we examine the ways in which individuals’ motivational strategies reflect and direct their career-related opportunity field. Our findings indicate that participants’ belie...

The authors propose an agent architecture which combines Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) and the belief-desire-intention (BDI) framework have several complementary strengths. The authors propose an agent architecture, which combines these two powerful approaches to capitalize on their strengths. Their architecture introduces the notion of intensity of the desire for a go...

Social communication requires shared representations as well as a cognitive flexibility for successful interactions between self and other. What neural mechanisms underlie the ability to distinguish between our own perspective vs. the perspective of others at a conceptual level? In this PET study subjects who were medical students were asked according to the experimental conditions to respond t...