Open AccessCommunication in action: Planning and interpreting communicative demonstrations.
Author(s) -
Mark K. Ho,
Fiery Cushman,
Michael L. Littman,
Joseph L. Austerweil
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of experimental psychology. general
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.521
H-Index - 161
eISSN - 1939-2222
pISSN - 0096-3445
DOI - 10.1037/xge0001035
Subject(s) - psychology , unobservable , theory of mind , cognitive psychology , mentalization , intentionality , imitation , affordance , observer (physics) , psycinfo , pragmatics , control (management) , social psychology , cognitive science , cognition , epistemology , computer science , linguistics , artificial intelligence , philosophy , physics , medline , quantum mechanics , neuroscience , political science , law
Theory of mind enables an observer to interpret others' behavior in terms of unobservable beliefs, desires, intentions, feelings, and expectations about the world. This also empowers the person whose behavior is being observed: By intelligently modifying her actions, she can influence the mental representations that an observer ascribes to her, and by extension, what the observer comes to believe about the world. That is, she can engage in intentionally communicative demonstrations . Here, we develop a computational account of generating and interpreting communicative demonstrations by explicitly distinguishing between two interacting types of planning. Typically, instrumental planning aims to control states of the environment, whereas belief-directed planning aims to influence an observer's mental representations. Our framework extends existing formal models of pragmatics and pedagogy to the setting of value-guided decision-making, captures how people modify their intentional behavior to show what they know about the reward or causal structure of an environment, and helps explain data on infant and child imitation in terms of literal versus pragmatic interpretation of adult demonstrators' actions. Additionally, our analysis of belief-directed intentionality and mentalizing sheds light on the sociocognitive mechanisms that underlie distinctly human forms of communication, culture, and sociality. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).