Dae Houlihan
Research Associate
Appointments
Fellow, Neukom Institute for Computational Science
Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program in Cognitive Science
Lecturer
Area of Expertise
Social Cognition,
Emotion Understanding,
Probabilistic Programming
Biography
Dae studies the cognitive mechanisms of social intelligence. Human social cognition shows remarkable sophistication and flexibility, as well as dramatic errors and limitations. Dae's research investigates how social cognition works, when it is effective, and what causes it to fail. He uses probabilistic programs to model how people reason about social situations, plan interactions, and interpret each others' emotional expressions. His work aims to reverse-engineer the mechanisms of social cognition in computational terms that are useful both for understanding the human mind and for building machines with human-like emotional intelligence. He is a Fellow of The Neukom Institute for Computational Science.
Education
Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Taught Courses
Publications
Houlihan, S. D., Kleiman-Weiner, M., Hewitt, L. B., Tenenbaum, J. B., & Saxe, R. (2023). Emotion prediction as computation over a generative theory of mind. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 381(2251), 20220047. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2022.0047.
Houlihan, S. D., Ong, D., Cusimano, M., & Saxe, R. (2022). Reasoning about the antecedents of emotions: Bayesian causal inference over an intuitive theory of mind. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 44, 854–861. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7sn3w3n2.
Houlihan, S. D., Tenenbaum, J. B., & Saxe, R. (2021). Linking Models of Theory of Mind and Measures of Human Brain Activity. In M. Gilead & K. N. Ochsner (Eds.), The Neural Basis of Mentalizing (pp. 209–235). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51890-5_11.
Saxe, R., & Houlihan, S. D. (2017). Formalizing emotion concepts within a Bayesian model of theory of mind. Current Opinion in Psychology, 17, 15–21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.04.019.
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