Uta Frith: Improving group decision-making: A Royal Society initiative

I will show an animation recently commissioned by the Royal Society which aims to help people make better decisions in groups. The animation is based on the review paper commissioned by the Diversity Committee: Bang, D. & Frith, C.D. 2017 Making better decisions in groups. R Soc Open Sci 4, 170193. The idea is to draw out some practical recommendations on how to apply the insights from the now extensive literature to selection panels and committees.

Chris Frith: Competition in social interactions - detecting agents and predicting what they are going to do next.

Competitive social interactions are a fundamental feature of animal life, for example, between predators and prey. I suggest that there are three levels of agency that can be observed in self-propelled agents – fixed action patterns, goal directed behaviour, and intentional behaviour. I will examine the computational mechanisms that are available to detect these different kinds of agents and predict their behaviour. This hierarchy of agency has interesting links with ideas about consciousness.

About the speakers:

Uta Frith, Professor, UCL

Chris Frith, Professor,  Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, UCL