Listen to me! Public announcements to agents that pay attention - or not

Abstract

In public announcement logic it is assumed that all agents pay attention (listen to/observe) to the announcement. Weaker observational conditions can be modelled in event (action) model logic. In this work, we propose a version of public announcement logic wherein it is encoded in the states of the epistemic model which agents pay attention to the announcement. This logic is called attention-based announcement logic, abbreviated ABAL. We give an axiomatization and prove that complexity of satisfiability is the same as that of public announcement logic, and therefore lower than that of action model logic [2]. We exploit our logic to formalize the concept of joint attention that has been widely discussed in the philosophical and cognitive science literature. Finally, we extend our logic by integrating attention change.