People can use the placement of objects to infer communicative goals
People can use the placement of objects to infer communicative goals
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DOI：
10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105524
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发表时间：
2023-07
期刊：
影响因子：
3.4
通讯作者：
Michael Lopez-Brau;J. Jara-Ettinger
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Michael Lopez-Brau;J. Jara-Ettinger
除了语言和手势之外，人们还有一种通过日常物品间接交流的非凡能力：椅子上的帽子可能意味着它被占用了，挂在入口处的绳子可能意味着我们不应该穿过，放在封闭盒子里的物品可能意味着它们不是我们的。人们是如何产生和解释物体的交际意义的？我们假设，这种能力是由社会目标推理，观察员恢复什么样的社会目标解释一个物体被放置在一个特定的位置。为了测试这个想法，我们研究了一类常见的ad-hoc通信对象，其中一个小的成本是用来避免信号。使用计算建模，我们首先表明，从间接的物理证据的目标推理可以产生使用对象的位置进行通信的能力。然后，我们表明，人们从美国和Tsimane '-一个农耕-觅食组原产于玻利维亚亚马逊河流域-可以推断的沟通意义的对象放置在没有预先存在的公约，人们的推断定量预测我们的模型。最后，我们证明了人们可以存储和检索这种意义用于随后的遭遇，揭示了一个潜在的机制，如何特设的沟通对象迅速成为惯例。我们的模型有助于揭示人类如何利用他们的能力来解释其他人的行为，将社会意义嵌入到物理世界中。
Beyond words and gestures, people have a remarkable capacity to communicate indirectly through everyday objects: A hat on a chair can mean it is occupied, rope hanging across an entrance can mean we should not cross, and objects placed in a closed box can imply they are not ours to take. How do people generate and interpret the communicative meaning of objects? We hypothesized that this capacity is supported by social goal inference, where observers recover what social goal explains an object being placed in a particular location. To test this idea, we study a category of common ad-hoc communicative objects where a small cost is used to signal avoidance. Using computational modeling, we first show that goal inference from indirect physical evidence can give rise to the ability to use object placement to communicate. We then show that people from the U.S. and the Tsimane’—a farming-foraging group native to the Bolivian Amazon—can infer the communicative meaning of object placement in the absence of a pre-existing convention, and that people’s inferences are quantitatively predicted by our model. Finally, we show evidence that people can store and retrieve this meaning for use in subsequent encounters, revealing a potential mechanism for how ad-hoc communicative objects become quickly conventionalized. Our model helps shed light on how humans use their ability to interpret other people’s behavior to embed social meaning into the physical world.