TY - JOUR
T1 - Shades of confusion
T2 - Lexical uncertainty modulates ad hoc coordination in an interactive communication task
AU - Murthy, Sonia K.
AU - Griffiths, Thomas L.
AU - Hawkins, Robert D.
N1 - Funding Information:
We are grateful for helpful conversations with Bill Thompson, Christiane Fellbaum, Josh Peterson, and Ken Norman. This work was supported by NSF Grant #1911835 to RH.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2022/8
Y1 - 2022/8
N2 - There is substantial variability in the expectations that communication partners bring into interactions, creating the potential for misunderstandings. To directly probe these gaps and our ability to overcome them, we propose a communication task based on color-concept associations. In Experiment 1, we establish several key properties of the mental representations of these expectations, or lexical priors, based on recent probabilistic theories. Associations are more variable for abstract concepts, variability is represented as uncertainty within each individual, and uncertainty enables accurate predictions about whether others are likely to share the same association. In Experiment 2, we then examine the downstream consequences of these representations for communication. Accuracy is initially low when communicating about concepts with more variable associations, but rapidly increases as participants form ad hoc conventions. Together, our findings suggest that people cope with variability by maintaining well-calibrated uncertainty about their partner and appropriately adaptable representations of their own.
AB - There is substantial variability in the expectations that communication partners bring into interactions, creating the potential for misunderstandings. To directly probe these gaps and our ability to overcome them, we propose a communication task based on color-concept associations. In Experiment 1, we establish several key properties of the mental representations of these expectations, or lexical priors, based on recent probabilistic theories. Associations are more variable for abstract concepts, variability is represented as uncertainty within each individual, and uncertainty enables accurate predictions about whether others are likely to share the same association. In Experiment 2, we then examine the downstream consequences of these representations for communication. Accuracy is initially low when communicating about concepts with more variable associations, but rapidly increases as participants form ad hoc conventions. Together, our findings suggest that people cope with variability by maintaining well-calibrated uncertainty about their partner and appropriately adaptable representations of their own.
KW - Communication
KW - Concepts
KW - Social representations
KW - Word-color associations
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U2 - 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105152
DO - 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105152
M3 - Article
C2 - 35605388
AN - SCOPUS:85130453267
SN - 0010-0277
VL - 225
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
M1 - 105152
ER -