mcdecisionmaking

[mcdecisionmaking]

Final Paper

4-30-2025

Here is my final reflection paper for COGS316

Mary Coulter

Decision Making

Dr. Mark Turner

29 April 2025

Under the Spotlight: How Can Actors Utilize Decision-Making Processes to Better Impact Audiences?

As an Acting Concentration in the Theater Department at Case Western Reserve University, I am always trying to find better ways to do my job as an actor. Cognitive Science is my secondary major, and throughout Decision Making (COGS316), I thought it would be useful to find out the Cognitive Science of acting. Over 16 weeks, I narrowed this curiosity to one question: How can actors use Cognitive Science to tell stories effectively to their audiences?

Throughout my small career as a cognitive scientist, I have always been interested in the theory of Embodied Cognition. I had inklings of the idea before coming to Case, and the Cognitive Science department provided me with evidence for ideas I had before knowing what Cognitive Science was. Embodied Cognition argues that cognitive processes are not limited to the confines of the brain. It presents an idea of cognition that is embodied, enacted, embedded, and extended. Fincher-Keifer explains, “The body is essential or central to human cognition.” The brain-body-environment loop is an active exchange of information and action that makes up human cognition. Embodied cognition requires a reexamination of previous methods of gathering knowledge.

To examine decision-making through the lens of embodied cognition, classical methods of decision-making data collection cannot be used. Gordon et al. review the current understanding of embodied decision making, beginning with reasoning why classical methods are not accurate. They write, “In this ‘classical' setting, there are a limited number of choices to be selected (often two) that are prespecified by the experimenter and presented simultaneously. Classical environments do not properly simulate the complex decision-making processes in human brains because the decisions are not simultaneous, our choices are often ambiguous and dynamic. Classical decision-making data also assumes that an agent will decide and then act, while Embodied decision-making requires an understanding that agents will act while deciding. “The decision-maker,” Gordon writes, “has to identify the options perceptually (under uncertainty) and to select the relevant choice dimensions… which are disregarded in classical settings.” To utilize embodied decision-making in my study of acting strategies, I had to understand that classical, lab-like decision-making experiments would not be helpful. Actors on stage use the information gathered from their brains, bodies, and environments to make the minute decisions and actions that make up a live theatrical performance.

While actors are on stage, many mental operations happen at once. At a basic level, “acting requires a range of social, cognitive and affective skills of concern to neuroscience, including memory, verbal ability, emotional control and social cognitive processes like empathy and Theory of Mind.” They use this large array of mental processes to do their job: help the director and company tell the story of the play. The true job of an actor is to be the most effective they can be as a cog in the machine that is a theatrical production. Some actors do tiny little things to make their performances “deeper,” but if an audience cannot register those actions, it may as well not have happened. What matters, in terms of actor performance, is what they give to the audience.

The audience is just as important as the actors, because they decide whether the story was told well. In the theater, the audience is part of the actors’ brain-body-environment loops, and the actors are part of the audience’s brain-body-environment loop. While the distance between the actor and an audience member can vary greatly, audience mirror neurons are activated by seeing someone do an action. Hank Green explains, “They fire both when you do something and when you watch someone do something.”Additionally, seeing something on stage that activates Gendler’s “alief,” like stage violence, “activates a set of affective response patterns and motor routines.” perhaps a squirm or gasp that causes “vestibular mismatch”. Even though audience member know a characters leg isn’t really broken, the visual input from the stage activates a response similar to if it really happened. Being in the same room as the characters in the play furthers the possible impact it can have on an audience member. 

Theatrical acting is extremely difficult to gather data from. Every production of every play is made to teach different people different lessons, and every actor’s body and choices are different. Even within the run of one show, each run is slightly different and so is hard to separate the test from the control. Because of the difficulties of studying live theater, there is very little experimental data in the intersection between theater and cognitive science. 

Fortunately, Professor Vera Tobin from the Case Wesern Reserve Cognitive Science department led me toward Chandra et al’s “Storytelling as Inverse Inverse planning”. Chandra, Li, Tenenbaum, and Ragan-Kelley propose, test, and find support for storytelling to be told through Inverse Inverse Bayesian planning. These writers separate methods of storytelling into two strategies: naive planning, telling the agent to do an action, and inverse inverse planning, telling the agent to tell a story about doing an action using predictor models of bayesian inverse planning. When an audience member sees a play, they take the information presented to them, actors and design elements alike, and use that data to create predictions and expectations for the future of the show. The paper cites Karin Kukkonen’s proposal, “storytelling is ‘probability design:’ the art of giving an audience pieces of information bit by bit, to craft the journey of their changing beliefs about the fictional world.” Chandra et al use this frame to program small animated agents to see if inverse inverse planning effectively impacts audiences. 

They start with an animated piece of cheese and a robot. These are the simplified versions of actors on a stage. The cheese has specific strengths, weakness, and goals, as does the robot. When even simple shapes like these are used correctly, they can portray a story to audiences. The cheese and robot were given goals: get to pink square and help cheese get to pink square, respectively. The naive planning section was made of simple commands given to the two agents to do their goals. For the test, they gave the task of inverse inverse planning to the cheese and robot. “When acting out a situation, the agent instead behaves optimally to manipulate an audience’s belief about that goal.” These scientists programmed a way for the cheese and robot to maximize the legibility of the goals of getting to the pink square and helping the cheese achieve that goal. They found that inverse inverse planning significantly improves audience understanding for the robot helping and hindering the cheese. 

A second experiment using physics and inverse inverse Bayseian planning also supported their claims. A small geometric figure will a certain level of strength was animated as it pulled a box up a hill. The box could be light, heavy, or light but the figure would mime the box being heavy. Chandra et al found that miming a heavy box was equally as effective as actually pulling a heavy box. This again supports the theatrical saying “show, dont tell.” By demonstrating assistance or hinderance to the cheese, and demonstrating pulling a heavy box up a hill, these small animated shapes can portray stories to audiences just as effectively, if not more effectively that outright doing the thing they were mimicking. 

We can scale back up to fully human actors. The naive planning strategy is akin to the inside-out school of acting. By simply doing an action that happens in the script, like crying, the audience may have trouble fully understanding the story. If they used bayesian planning instead, actors can demonstrate crying–short breaths, tight chest, sniffly nose–and be just as effective as storytellers to the audience. In the case of miming the heavy box, actors can mime stage violence rather than actually do it, which saves lots of time, money, and long-term injuries. 

I learned a lot this semester because I was constantly being remineded to think about this and dig deeper into the subject. Of course, I am already someone who practice outside-in acting, so perhaps this is a result of confirmation bias, but this concept of Bayesian Inverse Inverse Planning will continue to be in my thoughts as I progress through my Cognitive Science and Acting careers. 

Bibliography

Chandra, Kartik, Tzu-Mao Li, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, and Jonathan Ragan-Kelley. “Storytelling as Inverse Inverse Planning.” Topics in Cognitive Science Vol 16 (November 14, 2023): 54–70. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12710.

Fincher-Keifer, Rebecca. “An Introduction to the Theory of Embodied Cognition.” In How the Body Shapes Knowledge: Empirical Support for Embodied Cognition, 3–12. American Psychological Association, 2019. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0000136-001.

Gendler, Tamar Szabó. “Alief and Belief.” The Journal of Philosophy 105, no. 10 (2008): 634–63.

Gordon, Jeremy, Antonella Maselli, Gian Luca Lancia, Thomas Thiery, Paul Cisek, and Giovanni Pezzulo. “The Road towards Understanding Embodied Decisions.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 131 (December 1, 2021): 722–36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2021.09.034.

McDonald, Brennan, Thalia R. Goldstein, and Philipp Kanske. “Could Acting Training Improve Social Cognition and Emotional Control?” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience Vol 14 (September 23, 2020). https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2020.00348.

Sawyer, R. Keith. “Improvisation and the Creative Process: Dewey, Collingwood, and the Aesthetics of Spontaneity.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, no. 2 (2000): 149–61. https://doi.org/10.2307/432094.

Selvakumar, Ariya. “The Psychology of the Stage: Intersections of Cognitive Science and Theater.” Chapman University, 2023. Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters. https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cusrd_abstracts/618.

What Do Mirror Neurons Really Do?, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGYKcqzG_7M.

This essay is in Chicago style format, here is a pdf attachment so you can see my footnotes

file:///C:/Users/m5cou/Downloads/Deision%20Making%20Final%20Paper%20Acting.pdf

[mcdecisionmaking]

Class Notes

class notes 4-9

START with Name and Title of Project

making my slides this week/weekend

Point of beginning: Actors are harnessing the conscious and unconscious operations of decision making while they act in order to make believable performances.

Actors have been tricking us! What do they do that makes us believe them? Or Alieve them?

I need to really really dive deep into the inverse inverse planning storytelling article.

What happens in the actors' mind and body and environment that tells moving stories and keeps the history of theater alive.

Sensory feelings--awareness in the body, postures, limb positions, facial expression, motor skills

Attention-- audience, scene partners, lights sound set, story as a whole

Memory-- line memorization, blocking memorization, training memory recall, emotional memory

planning!

Embodied cognition-- decisions happen in the body before they happen in the conscious mind.

Method acting is not needed! People will attribute feelings and motives to shapes! all actors need to do is move feel speak in the right focused way and audiences will beleive

Audiences observe the body! Big huge auditoriums or ampitheaters

Actors have been (not excatly western scientifically) using these techniques for centuries

HYPOTHESIS: Actors do not need to method act, all they need to do is use their bodies and environment to give audiences the opportunity to put a story onto them

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Class Notes 4-7

How is theatrical acting effective? Why has theater survived so mong throughout human history, even against radio, television, and film? What is it about in-person theater that makes people pay for it and come back and write stories and want to be in those stories?

What are the mental operations behind acting on stage? Is there a list of mental operations? Or can I just break a concept down until I think it is a mental operation? Like line memorization, blocking, awareness of the body, posture, relationship with other characters, sensational awareness, memory recall, understanding of the whole story, etc...

Data! Inverse-inverse Bayesian storytelling! I need to work through that article so I can fully understand it. Hopefully this data model will be able to realistically transfer to people. The shapes that were studied in this article would become physical actors.

Bodies!!! People are moving their bodies all the time!!!!!!!! Open, close, 6 directions, movement of sensations, posture, acting is in the body!!! yipeeee!!!! Chekov and Lecoq

[mcdecisionmaking]

Class thoughts

3-26

What is my hypothesis?

The physical movements made by actors on (hopefully theatrical) stages conveys storytelling as much/more than just verbal queues.

Physical movement...speaking...speaking while moving... psychological gesture.... audiences...mirror neurons.....visual stimulus....

I want to see deeper into the effectiveness of physical movement in theatrical storytelling. I want to take the data from Tobin's inverse inverse storytelling studies and impose it onto an experiment where Tobin's shapes become my actors. I think the physicality within acting displays decisions just as much if not more than just verbally saying the lines in a play.

I could,,, idk,,, take two audiences and do the same performance but one performance includes the practices of psychological gesture and the other performance just has simple blocking and recited lines and possibly a third audience where its a table reading?

[mcdecisionmaking]

More Spring Break Thoughts

3 March 2025

I'm feeling much better about my progress than last time I posted. Here is a list of things I have learned:

There are Cognitive Scientists who study theater and Actors who study cognitive science! And some of them work with each other and support each other's work yippee!

Most of these scholars start from a point of emphasis on Embodied Cognition. This makes me want to shift the focus of my project away from mental operations and toward embodied cognition.

Decision Making->The body-> Embodied Cognition-> Stanislavski, Chekov, Laban, Lecoq Theatrical teachings (Possibly also antoine artaud?)->Acting on stage->Audiences "believing" a performance/experiencing catharsis. (this is a flowchart of the many thoughts floating in my head)

My new plan of action is to go deeper into studying Bruce McConachie, Rick Kemp, John Lutterbie, Amy Cook, and Vladimir Mirolan

I also need to comment on my classmates' blogs, which I have been seriously avoiding but will stop doing.

I need to catch up on R work, and speaking of R->

I need to find a way to collect/showcase data for this project. I am still leaning on the idea of multiple video clips of the same performance

[mcdecisionmaking]

Mid Break Check In

3-13-2025

Resting during this well-deserved break, and now trying to get back to work. Here is a list of things I am thinking about right now.

Hard to find research in the intersection of cognitive science and theatrical acting. Most of what I have found is more focused on audience experiences, which I guess acting is passed along from actor to audience... Maybe I can approach from the other direction at literature of acting and see who blends towards cognitive research....

I don't know a comprehensive list of mental operations(?). I can totally write down verbs that comes up in my theatrical vocabulary but I don't know what counts as a mental operation (ie. memorizing words, conjuring sentences, consciousness of the whole body, opening your heart, like what exactly IS a mental operation?)

I don't know what to do about data because I think the most academically accessible way to showcase theatrical actors is through videos of the works... The easiest would probably multiple versions of a Shakespeare production because they're in public domain and have no shortage of productions. I am unsure if Shakespeare would be more or less helpful when trying to decipher if a decision is "believable" because the general public often has trouble understanding Elizabethan storylines and standards. We shall see...

For now, I am going to keep searching for things and reading them..........

[mcdecisionmaking]

Under the Spotlight: What are the Mental Operations behind the Truthful Portrayal of Decisions on Stage?

Hi! I'm Mary Coulter!! Welcome to my blog for COGS 316.

Here, You can find my blog posts for my project, R work (which I will catch up on during spring break), and general class notes/ideas, please don't mind my stream of consciousness and lack of respect for spelling during class :)

[mcdecisionmaking]

Project Thinking

2-19-25

I feel I need to rethink this project: Right now its looking like an examination of dcision making in improv, but I fear (even though its what i want) improv is too open ended/not controlled enough for me to study

Maybe I could look at embodied acting and the actual brain working that goes into making decision on stage and how that affects both actor and audience member. What exactly does an onstage decision look like? How do audience members know whats real and whats not? How can actors portray real choices? Subtle choices? Subconscious choices?

Point of examination: What are the mental operations behind actors making decisions on stage?

Here's some notes from class:

What are the mental operations behind actors when they make decisions on a stage?

Mental operations behind actors taking inforamtion from a script and their director and the lights, set, sound, costumes, and turn it into a beleivable potrayal of a decision-

Acting resources: lecoq, Chekov, Laban, movment, decision making, richard neale

Acting under the Spotlight Acting on Stage: Portraying Truthful Decision Making and the Mental Operations Beind It

the princesss of cleve by madamme de lafayette-- used in the theater the avowel scene-- shes in love each characters mental processes are different the man she loves has climbed a tree; husband is questioning her; truth to whom. who is the audience, how do you say something that can be understood in different ways to different people

i feel so much better now that I've decided to change the topic

Acting Under the Spotlight: Mental Operations Behind the Truthful Portrayal of Decision Making

Acting Philosophy: Lecoq, Chekov,

Cog Scientists: Amy Cook, Mark Turner

Mental Operations: identify script, adopt character, find motivation? adopt surroundings, use architecture of the space, identify problem, , stakes, objective, obstacle, tactics,

What performance(s) will I examine? Certain moments within plays? How many moments will I need? What elements of the Body/Brain can I observe, how do I categorize these decisions? Like when a characters decides to reveal/commit/accept something? What happens in the actors' brain? What happens to their body?

Real world applications: Make better actors? Keep actors safe? Change people's perspectives on acting?

specific human performance- like when helly stops pretending to be her innie, maybe I'll find a recorded stage performance cause I like thinking about being in the space with the audience-- check digital theater+, youtube of full body shots of a character making a decision, maybe I can examine the comedy of errors but its not that deep, maybe the grad students?-- Recording, observation, and categorization of actors in a performance while they make decisions; there are many schools of acting, maybe this observation can help consolidate acting technique? maybe show that method does or doesnt work? Some acting techniques work for some actors and actors have to learn a lot and take what works and leave what doesnt

How do people find out what mental operations are happening? Other than just assuming or something

I should redo my deepresearch prompt tbh...

[mcdecisionmaking]

Deep Research Prompt

2-15-25

for the record, I have not used ANY genAI so far in this class (and also all of my other classes this semester) and I plan to minimize my use of it. I want to maximize the mental strength I have and to me that means making my brain do the work of finding and sorting information.

That said, here is my best DeepResearch prompt:

Pretend to be an expert in Cognitive science with a specialization in decision-making. Become familiar with as much decision-making information having to do with theater, improvisation, and performance as you can.

Please generate a detailed and cited report of current knowledge and areas of interest in the field of decision-making in theatrical improvisation. Find studies, articles, books, and other resources that have information on studying decision making through the lens of theater and improv performance. Also, please make a list of ways to find data concerning theater and examples of studies where the subjects were theatrical improvisers. Provide an overview of all knowledge of decision making in improv. Identify areas within the field where more information can be found- what aspects of decision making in theater are still questions? Please cite all sources and include the URL of websites/articles/etc for me to reference. Make recommendations of methods for finding decision making information. Find information on how improvisers make decisions and how they contribute to the success of their teams. Ask: what strategies of decision making do improvisers use and which decisions are helpful? For format, break the report into nested headers, and feel free to include tables and graphs. Include a section with full bibliographic citations. Indicate human specialists who might be consulted for advice on designing a study. The prose style should be clear, direct, intelligible, and idiomatic American academic English.

[mcdecisionmaking]

2-9-25 Week 5 Homework

(.001)/(.010999) = 9.09%

(.005)/(.01495) = 33.44%

Yippee Bayes Theorem!

[mcdecisionmaking]

02-09

Got my CITI Cert finally...

[mcdecisionmaking]

Survey

3 areas of interest: collaboration, (social) bravery, systems of community under oppression

Collaboration has been my initial interest, especially when considering collaboration in theater arts/writing/comedy. I am interested in the fast decisions made in an improv scene. There are some ground rules to improv, like keeping inside the universe that has been previously created, and that action is better than explanation. I want to examine the moment a player decides to speak/act in a way that improves an improv scene. What does a good action do to/for the other players in the scene? How can we categorize actions/words to understand what exactly makes a good improv scene good?

Social Bravery has interested me throughout my life. I am curious about the "brave" actions people can do, especially in art making. This can include improv, like trying a new idea without any forethought or planning. Bravery can also include wearing strange clothes, saying what's on your mind, or following an impulse that societal rules discourage. I am curious about the 'muscle' of bravery and how to train to stop getting stuck in decision-making spirals and instead just do the thing a person has an impulse to do. In theater, bravery can be an opening of a person to reveal their wants and needs without guarding against denial or ostracization. What systems do brave people use when following their impulses?

This one is not particularly in the improv topic, but I am interested in the human nature of collaboration and community building. Under systems of oppression, whether governmental, military, or social, people create and sustain communities to help each other. This goes against the typical prisoners dilemma: oppressed peoples easiest option would be to rat out their fellow "prisoners" to obtain maximum payoff for themselves, but LGBT people, African Americans, impoverished people, Palestinians, basically the entire global south, and anyone else constricted by their social order tend to choose to risk personal payoff for the sake of their community. Many activists go to jail and endure terrible consequences to protect their community. I want to look closely at the tendency to band together against the lens of game theory.

[mcdecisionmaking]

baby's second plot

R Still Scares Me

1-26-25

This is my first plot I've ever coded in my life. Bazinga!

[mcdecisionmaking]

R Still Scares Me

1-26-25

This is my first plot I've ever coded in my life. Bazinga!

[mcdecisionmaking]

cygwin64 terminal

1-25-25

I think this is right? pls let me know if not

[mcdecisionmaking]

AI Shortcourse

1-25-25

Just finished the canvas GenAI short course.

I found it moderately helpful. Lots of the information is stuff that Mark has already taught us, especially the RTRI format of prompting. I found this to be a more productive way to teach students how to properly prompt than sending Mark after every student at the university. It helped me to know that KSL and UTech employees are up to date with GenAI, as I often feel that the university is lacking/falling behind on the technological realities of students.

I fear that students will continue to have Gen AI create citations, discussion submissions, and assignments without an understanding that it could be wrong. I have used Chat GPT (I call it Chatty) to create MLA and Chicago citations in the past, and although I don't know it contained mistakes, I would not put money on them being correct.

[mcdecisionmaking]

Game Overview

1-25-2025

Stag Hunt:

Stag Hunt is a well known game in game theory, although not as well known as the prisoner's dilemma.

Say two hunters (or possibly more) are out in the woods, trying to find enough meat to feed everyone. There are often hares going about the woods, and the stag comes around every so often, with no pattern or warning for when it may approach. The hunters must stay quiet, to not scare any wildlife away. The two hunters (not able to speak without spooking animals) must individually decide to shoot a hare or wait and work together to kill a stag. If either hunter decides to shoot a hare, they lose the chance to kill other animals, and only the hunter that shot the hare will have enough meat. If both hunters wait for the stag and work together to kill it, they will have more than enough. This is the version of the game that was originally published by Jean-Jaques Rousseau during the Enlightenment period.

Stag hunt is a simple game with one equilibrium-- for both hunters to benefit, both must wait for the stag. This game is said to simulate basic social cooperation. At first glance of this game, I find myself skeptical of its usefulness in studying human decision making. First, the players are not "able" to communicate in this version of the game. There are variations where players can communicate before the hunt begins, but I argue that two players in a game like a stag hunt would always be able to communicate. We know that the majority of human communication is non-verbal already, and people go into situations like this by preparing the options and solutions to common problems that may occur like a stag not showing up for a while. I find that many game theory games don't let players communicate, and while that can happen in real life, like prisoners in two different cells, most real world applications of these games let players communicate with each other, or at least get hints and clues from the rest of the world.

In accordance with the "Against Game Theory" reading, I believe game theories do not begin to cover the scope of human variation from each other. In Stag Hunt, each player would have lived experiences that draw them to different actions: they may have different perceptions of when it is time to give up, how much meat a hare and stag have respectively, what the other player wants most, and how hunting can be optimally done. This situation assumes both players know they would be better off if they had the amount of meat from a stag, which is already a bold assumption. I believe that game theory, including the ideas from Stag Hunt, does not properly cover the infinitely varying variability of the human experience.

I find two things interesting about this game: teamwork and hunger. I am curious to know the abilities of humans to create teams and to work with and for each other, as cooperation is one of the biggest reasons humans have taken over the planet. I would like to explore how teamwork affects the theories in game theory, and the abilities of teams to overcome impossible situations, especially when the motivation is not scarcity, but the well-being of the other people on the team.

I have also been reflecting on what hunger does to decision-making. I listened to a podcast by Ismatu Gwendolyn, who said in a recent episode "you do not understand what hunger does to people. What it does to your neighbors, and how far people will go to stop feeling hungry." The ruthlessness that comes from hunger both frightens and interests me.

Classmate: if you know any sources/podcasts/videos that may interest me regarding this post, let me know