Victor Btesh

Taking others for granted: balancing presentational and personal goals in action selection

Victor Btesh, David A. Lagnado, Tobias Gerstenberg
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 47, 2025 - Code

Less is more: Local focus in continuous time causal learning

Victor Btesh, Neil R. Bramley, Maarten Speekenbrink, David A. Lagnado
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 2025 - Code - Demo

Variational inference for continuous time causal learning

Victor Btesh, Neil R. Bramley, J-Philipp Fränken, Maarten Speekenbrink, David A. Lagnado
Cognitive Computational Neuroscience, 2023 - Code - Demo

Swipe and hold: composing interventions in continuous time causal learning

Victor Btesh, Neil R. Bramley, Maarten Speekenbrink, David A. Lagnado
CogSci, 2023 - Code - Demo

Redressing the emperor in causal clothing

Victor Btesh, Neil R. Bramley, David A. Lagnado
Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 2022

I am currently a PhD student in the department of Experimental Psychology at University College London.
I am interested in the cognitive basis of the construction of social reality: how we build and maintain rich mental models of others and the social world, and how these models guide what we do and how we understand others. I take inverse planning and theory of mind as a starting point, a powerful account of how we read goals and beliefs from actions, but only as a starting point. Even the most ordinary behaviours, like making coffee for someone or accepting an invitation, carry social meaning that depends on the relationship and norms at play. I believe these richer inferences are rooted in lower level intuitive theories about the motivations which animate human behaviour: e.g. our and others' welfare, status and power, or the desire to be seen in a certain way. I think these form the basis over which rest our intuitions about hierarchy, relationships, and social norms. My aim is to formalise these theories, and through them, understand how social norms and relationships are learned and inferred.