Pôle Interactions Formal Methods for Human Behavior
Contact: Alain Finkel
Frédéric Boulanger
Topics
The team is concerned with the modeling of human behavior and psychology using formal techniques in order to have a better understanding of it, and eventually to study the combined behavior of humans and systems.
Some of the topics that are currently addressed in this group are:
- Formal modeling of psychological theories: how to model psychological theories using formal tools in order to validate their consistency and to check their properties.
- Formalization of subjective experiences
- Modeling psychotherapy methods using formal tools
- Modeling personal narratives as symbolic sequences to enable alternative analyses
- Detecting emotions and mental states
- Formal modeling of mental states: in the diagnosis of human errors in critical systems, formal models are useful to explore the possible mental states of the human agents, in order to determine what information was missing or ignored. This can be used to improve the training of the agents and to build better human-machine interfaces.
- Formal modeling of domain-specific knowledge: in the context of the detection of cognitive biases, an explicit and symbolic model of the knowledge that is specific to a domain (medicine, airlines, nuclear power plants) is necessary to provide human agents with motivated and explainable alerts. Such models are used to reason by abduction to reconstruct possible realities from observations, and possible mental states from the actions performed by the agent. See the IDEFIX ANR Project.
Other topics may be considered, such as:
- Ethics and moral, utilitarianism
- Education, epistemology
- Decision mechanisms
Working group
A working group on Computational Psychology has been created, with the support of the ISN Graduate School 
A first workshop on Computational Psychology took place on June 10th 2026.