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Human communication is thoroughly context bound. We present two experiments investigating the importance of the shared context, that is, the amount of knowledge two interlocutors have in common, for the successful emergence and use of novel conventions. Using a referential communication task where black‐and‐white pictorial symbols are used to convey colors, pairs of participants build shared conventions peculiar to their dyad without experimenter feedback, relying purely on ostensive‐inferential communication. Both experiments demonstrate that access to the visual context promotes more successful communication. Importantly, success improves cumulatively, supporting the view that pairs establish conventional ways of using the symbols to communicate. Furthermore, Experiment 2 suggests that dyads with access to the visual context successfully adapt the conventions built for one color space to another color space, unlike dyads lacking it. In linking experimental pragmatics with language evolution, the study illustrates the benefits of exploring the emergence of linguistic conventions using an ostensive‐inferential model of communication.

Dogs’ production of referential communicative signals, i.e., showing , has gained increasing scientific interest over the last years. In this paper, we investigate whether shared information about the present and the past affects success and form of dog–human interactions. Second, in the context of showing, owners have always been treated as passive receivers of the dog’s signals. Therefore, we examined whether the owner’s behavior can influence the success and form of their dog’s showing behavior. To address these questions, we employed a hidden-object task with knowledgeable dogs and naïve owners. Shared information about the present was varied via the spatial set-up, i.e., position of hiding places, within dog–owner pairs, with two conditions requiring either high or low precision in indicating the target location. Order of conditions varied between pairs, representing differences in shared knowledge about the past (communication history). Results do not support an effect of communication history on either success or showing effort. In contrast, the spatial set-up was found to affect success and choice of showing strategies. However, dogs did not adjust their showing effort according to different spatial set-ups. Our results suggest that the latter could be due to the owner’s influence. Owner behavior generally increased the effort of their dog’s showing behavior which was stronger in the set-up requiring low showing precision. Moreover, our results suggest that owners could influence their dog’s showing accuracy (and thereby success) which, however, tended to be obstructive. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s10071-020-01409-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Cultural evolutionary theory provides a framework for explaining change in population-level distributions. A consistent finding in the literature is that multiple transmission episodes shape a distribution of cultural traits to become more compressible, i.e., a set of derived traits are more compressed than their ancestral forms. Importantly, this amplification of compressible patterns can become manifest in two ways, either via the homogenisation of variation or through the organisation of variation into structured and specialised patterns. Using a novel, large-scale dataset from Reddit Place, an online collaborative art project, we investigate the emergence and evolution of compressible patterns on a 1000x1000 pixel canvas. Here, all Reddit users could select a coloured pixel, place it on the canvas, and then wait for a fixed period before placing another pixel. By analysing all 16.5 million pixel placements by over 1 million individuals, we found that compression follows a quadratic trajectory through time. From a non-structured state, where individual artworks exist relatively independently from one another, Place gradually transitions to a structured state where pixel placements form specialised, interdependent patterns.

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