1,100 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Conversational expectations account for apparent limits on theory of mind use
Theory of mind is a powerful cognitive ability: by the ageof six, people are capable of accurately reasoning about oth-ers’ beliefs and desires. An influential series of language un-derstanding experiments by Keysar and colleagues, however,showed that adults systematically failed to take a speaker’sbeliefs into account, revealing limitations on theory of mind.In this paper we argue that these apparent failures are in factsuccesses. Through a minimal pair of replications comparingscripted vs. unscripted speakers, we show that critical utter-ances used by Keysar and colleagues are uncooperative: theyare less informative than what a speaker would actually pro-duce in that situation. When we allow participants to naturallyinteract, we find that listener expectations are justified and er-rors are reduced. This ironically shows that apparent failuresof theory of mind are in fact attributable to sophisticated ex-pectations about speaker behavior—that is, to theory of mind
Generalizing meanings from partners to populations: Hierarchical inference supports convention formation on networks
A key property of linguistic conventions is that they hold over an entire
community of speakers, allowing us to communicate efficiently even with people
we have never met before. At the same time, much of our language use is
partner-specific: we know that words may be understood differently by different
people based on our shared history. This poses a challenge for accounts of
convention formation. Exactly how do agents make the inferential leap to
community-wide expectations while maintaining partner-specific knowledge? We
propose a hierarchical Bayesian model to explain how speakers and listeners
solve this inductive problem. To evaluate our model's predictions, we conducted
an experiment where participants played an extended natural-language
communication game with different partners in a small community. We examine
several measures of generalization and find key signatures of both
partner-specificity and community convergence that distinguish our model from
alternatives. These results suggest that partner-specificity is not only
compatible with the formation of community-wide conventions, but may facilitate
it when coupled with a powerful inductive mechanism.Comment: CogSci 202
Recommended from our members
Animal, dog, or dalmatian? Level of abstraction in nominal referring expressions
Nominal reference is very flexible—the same object may becalled a dalmatian, a dog, or an animal when all are literallytrue. What accounts for the choices that speakers make in howthey refer to objects? The addition of modifiers (e.g. big dog)has been extensively explored in the literature, but fewer stud-ies have explored the choice of noun, including its level of ab-straction. We collected freely produced referring expressionsin a multi-player reference game experiment, where we ma-nipulated the object’s context. We find that utterance choiceis affected by the contextual informativeness of a description,its length and frequency, and the typicality of the object forthat description. Finally, we show how these factors naturallyenter into a formal model of production within the RationalSpeech-Acts framework, and that the resulting model predictsour quantitative production data
- …