Fall 2026 GRASP on Robotics: Alan Stocker, University of Pennsylvania, “Embodied and Efficient: Toward a Resource-Rational Theory of Human Cognition”
October 23 at 10:30 AM - 11:45 AM
Organizer
grasplab@seas.upenn.edu
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Venue
This will be an in-person event ONLY in Wu and Chen Auditorium.
ABSTRACT
Human cognition is implemented in a physical system (our brain and body) with limited resources . Perception, memory, and decision-making therefore must reflect smart trade-offs between performance and the associated resource costs of acquiring, representing, and maintaining information. I will present a resource-rational view of cognition and illustrate how seemingly suboptimal behavior can emerge as an efficient response to these trade-offs. More broadly, I will argue for understanding cognition as part of an embodied, autonomous system shaped by task and environmental specific demands, as well as internal resource constraints. I will conclude by discussing opportunities for robotics and cognitive science to learn from each other, with the goal of developing and validating a more general theory of intelligent behavior of autonomous agents.
Speaker
Alan Stocker
University of Pennsylvania
Alan Stocker is a Professor in Psychology at UPenn. He has undergraduate degrees in Material Science and Biomedical Engineering, both from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland. He subsequently also earned his PhD in Physics from ETH Zurich where he was advised by Rodney Douglas and Eric Vittoz. He then joined the lab of Eero Simoncelli at the Center for Neural Science at NYU New York as a Postdoctoral Fellow. After this postdoctoral education he started his on lab as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at UPenn, where he has been since. At UPenn, Alan Stocker has developed an influential research program studying the fundamental computational processes that govern human vision and decision-making. He has won a CAREER award in 2014.