Social Pragmatics: Preschoolers Rely on Commonsense Psychology to Resolve Referential Underspecification

Jara‐Ettinger, Julian; Floyd, Sammy; Huey, Holly; Tenenbaum, Joshua B.; Schulz, Laura

doi:10.1111/cdev.13290

Cited by 12 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…As such, it connects to computational and empirical work that tries to explain social reasoning by assuming that humans expect each other to behave in a way that maximizes the benefits and minimizes the cost associated with actions. 27,63,64 Our model and empirical paradigm provide a foundation on which to test deeper questions about language development. First, our findings should be replicated in children from different cultural backgrounds, learning different languages.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…When information integration is studied directly, the focus is mostly on how children interpret an ambiguous referring expression in light of social-contextual information. [24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31] In one classic study, 32 children faced a 2 x 2 display with a ball, a pen and two glasses in it.…”

Section: From Early In Development Children Use Several Different Mementioning

confidence: 99%

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How young children integrate information sources to infer the meaning of words

Bohn¹,

Tessler²,

Merrick³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Before formal education begins, children typically acquire a vocabulary of thousands of words. This learning process requires the use of many different information sources in their social environment, including their current knowledge state as well as the context in which they hear words used. How is this information integrated? We specify a model according to which children consider all available information sources and integrate them via Bayesian inference. This model accurately predicted 2-to-5 year-old children’s word learning across a range of experimental conditions. Model comparison suggests that the integration process is stable across development and that the main locus of development is an increased sensitivity to individual information sources. We present a quantitative developmental theory of information integration for language learning, embedded in a larger framework that grounds language use and learning in social cognition.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: From Early In Development Children Use Several Different Mementioning

confidence: 99%

How young children integrate information sources to infer the meaning of words

Bohn¹,

Tessler²,

Merrick³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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“…We answer these questions by formalizing the Naïve Utility Calculus in a computational model that performs approximate Bayesian inferences of costs and rewards over extended sequences of actions that unfold over time and space. Our model builds on but extends substantially beyond previous qualitative formulations (Jara-Ettinger, Gweon, Schulz, & Tenenbaum, 2016;Jara-Ettinger, Floyd, Huey, Tenenbaum, & Schulz, 2019;Jara-Ettinger, Floyd, Tenenbaum, & Schulz, 2017), as well as simpler quantitative formulations of utility-based action understanding (e.g., Baker et al, 2019;Lucas et al, 2014;Jern, Lukas, & Kemp, 2017) that do not attempt to account for inferences about multiple dimensions of cost and reward, or complex actions operating over multiple spatial and temporal scales. We then present a set of quantitative experiments that test if (1) the Naïve Utility Calculus supports joint inferences of costs and reward from observable actions; if (2) these inferences can be captured with quantitative precision; and (3) if these judgments are best explained by a unified theory structured around the single assumption that agents approximately maximize utilities.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

The Naïve Utility Calculus as a unified, quantitative framework for action understanding

Jara‐Ettinger

Schulz

Tenenbaum

2020

Cognitive Psychology

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The human ability to reason about the causes behind other people' behavior is critical for navigating the social world. Recent empirical research with both children and adults suggests that this ability is structured around an assumption that other agents act to maximize some notion of subjective utility. In this paper, we present a formal theory of this Naïve Utility Calculus as a probabilistic generative model, which highlights the role of cost and reward tradeoffs in a Bayesian framework for action-understanding. Our model predicts with quantitative accuracy how people infer agents' subjective costs and rewards based on their observable actions. By distinguishing between desires, goals, and intentions, the model extends to complex action scenarios unfolding over space and time in scenes with multiple objects and multiple action episodes. We contrast our account with simpler model variants and a set of special-case heuristics across a wide range of action-understanding tasks: inferring costs and rewards, making confidence judgments about relative costs and rewards, combining inferences from multiple events, predicting future behavior, inferring knowledge or ignorance, and reasoning about social goals. Our work sheds light on the basic representations and computations that structure our everyday ability to make sense of and navigate the social world.

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“…Our computational model is structured around an assumption that agents act to maximize their subjective utilities-the difference between the costs that they incur and rewards that they obtain. This assumption is at the heart of human mental-state inferences in adults [Jern et al, 2017;Baker et al, 2017;Jara-Ettinger et al, 2019b], it emerges early in development [Liu et al, 2017;Jara-Ettinger et al, 2016;Gergely & Csibra, 2003;Lucas et al, 2014], and supports high-level cognition from moral reasoning [Ullman et al, 2009;Jara-Ettinger et al, 2015;Kleiman-Weiner et al, 2017], to language understanding [Grosse et al, 2010;Hanna & Tanenhaus, 2004;Jara-Ettinger et al, 2019a] and pedagogy [Bridgers et al, 2020].…”

Section: Computational Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 89%

People can use the placement of objects to infer communicative goals

Lopez-Brau¹,

Jara‐Ettinger²

2020

Preprint

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Beyond words and gestures, people have a remarkable capacity to also communicate through objects: A hat on a chair means it is occupied, rope hanging across an entrance means we should not cross, and objects placed in a closed box means they are not ours to take. How do people generate and interpret the social meaning of objects? We propose that this capacity emerges from our ability to reason about the motives behind other agents' actions. We show that a computational model that infers mental states based on how agents manipulate their environment spontaneously gives rise to the ability to communicate through objects. As predicted by our model, we found that people from both industrialized and non-industrialized societies can infer the communicative meaning of objects, even in the absence of a pre-existing convention. Moreover, we show that, after inferring the meaning of an unconventional object, people can store and retrieve its meaning in subsequent encounters, revealing a mechanism behind the widespread use of conventional communicative objects. Our model sheds light on how humans use their ability to interpret other people's behavior to embed social meaning into the physical world.

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Social Pragmatics: Preschoolers Rely on Commonsense Psychology to Resolve Referential Underspecification

Cited by 12 publications

References 47 publications

How young children integrate information sources to infer the meaning of words

How young children integrate information sources to infer the meaning of words

The Naïve Utility Calculus as a unified, quantitative framework for action understanding

People can use the placement of objects to infer communicative goals

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