% Probabilistic Models of Cognition
In this book, we explore the probabilistic approach to cognitive science, which models learning and reasoning as inference in complex probabilistic models. In particular, we examine how a broad range of empirical phenomena in cognitive science (including intuitive physics, concept learning, causal reasoning, social cognition, and language understanding) can be modeled using a functional probabilistic programming language called Church.
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This book contains many exercises where you will write and run Church code directly in the browser. At the end of some chapters, we present extended exercises as homework problems; to save your progress on homework problems, you can register an account. Registering an account also helps us improve the book by tracking what kinds of programs users run and what kinds of errors they encounter.
Please cite this book as: N. D. Goodman and J. B. Tenenbaum (electronic). Probabilistic Models of Cognition. Retrieved <Date> from http://probmods.org.
Send any errors to probmods@REMOVETHISgmail.com
This book is open source. We use Github to host the repositories for the book content, the accounts infrastructure, and the WebChurch engine, which supports running Church programs in the browser. We welcome issues and pull requests.
We are grateful to the following people, who contributed content or technical expertise: Timothy J. O'Donnell, Andreas Stuhlmuller, Tomer Ullman, John McCoy, Long Ouyang, Julius Cheng.
The construction and ongoing support of this tutorial are made possible by grants from the Office of Naval Research, the James S. McDonnell Foundation, the Stanford VPOL, and the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines (funded by NSF STC award CCF-1231216).
Code examples are based on the WebChurch system. Examples are best viewed in recent versions of Chrome, Firefox, or Safari on a laptop or desktop computer. Error messages will be most useful when viewed with Chrome.
This book contains many technical exercises that run directly in your web browser. At the end of some chapters, we present some extended exercises as homework problems. To save your progress on homework problems, you can register an account; this also helps us improve the book by tracking what kinds of programs users run and what kinds of errors they encounter. Login or register an account