How does interacting with artificial intelligence shape human understanding? Princeton psychology professor Tania Lombrozo will draw on insights from psychology, philosophy and cognitive science to consider risks that come with advances in AI, alongside sources of potential reassurance that reflect the resilience of human cognition. Lombrozo is the Arthur W. Marks ’19 Professor of Psychology, director of the Program in Cognitive Science and co-director of the Natural and Artificial Minds Initiative. 

On the side of risk, interacting with AI systems can foster illusions of understanding in humans. On the reassuring side, some of the very same mechanisms that allow us to evaluate our own and other humans’ understanding can help us be more discerning in our interactions with AI. 

Speaker

Lombrozo’s research aims to address basic questions about learning, reasoning and decision-making using the empirical tools of experimental psychology and the conceptual tools of analytic philosophy. Accordingly, much of her work is informed by philosophy of science, epistemology and moral philosophy alongside cognitive, social and developmental psychology. To illustrate, one strand of research in the Lombrozo laboratory has focused on the human drive to explain. Why are we so compelled to explain some aspects of our social and physical environment, but not others? How does the process of seeking explanations affect learning, and how does the quality of an explanation affect our judgments and decisions? Do these features of explanation help us achieve particular epistemic goals? Or do they sometimes lead us astray, causing errors in our reasoning and decision-making? Other projects target different topics — including our intuitive beliefs about causation, moral responsibility and the nature of knowledge — but involve a similar interplay between descriptive questions about human thought and behavior and normative and conceptual issues that arise within philosophy and cognitive science.

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