Fast and frugal memory search for communication

Abstract

Communication involves searching for optimal utterances within memory and then evaluating those utterances against a target goal. This task is substantially harder when information about multiple concepts has to be communicated, such as describing how music and tides are similar. Whether the search process for this challenging communicative task converges onto the optimal response relatively quickly, or involves more strategic decision-making to evaluate different candidates remains understudied. In this work, speakers generated single word "clues" that would enable a listener to correctly identify a pair of words among several distractor words. Speakers and listeners generated candidates before producing final responses. Each player was biased towards the first candidate(s) they generated, even when this candidate was sub-optimal compared to other candidates, as was the case for less related concepts. Furthermore, straying away from the initial semantic "patch" of responses decreased accuracy in the game. Overall, these findings suggest that individuals tend to identify the relevant semantic cluster early on during semantic search, and are likely to employ the "take-the-first" strategy for selecting utterances in ambiguous, ill-defined semantic contexts.