Ad-hoc Implicature in Preschool Children

Stiller, Alex J.; Goodman, Noah D.; Frank, Michael C.

doi:10.1080/15475441.2014.927328

Cited by 195 publications

(200 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…As noted, when preschoolers are shown just a single function of a toy, they infer that the toy has only one function, even if the teacher does not explicitly assert that no other functions are present (Bonawitz et al, 2011). Relatedly, children who are asked to choose a face "with glasses" prefer a face with glasses and no hat to a face with glasses and a hat; presumably if the speaker had meant the latter, she would have mentioned the hat (Stiller, Frank, Goodman, 2011). Thus sins of omission are closely related to violations of Gricean Maxim of Quantity, which states that a speaker should be as informative as required in communicative contexts (Grice, 1975;Horn, 1984).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sins of omission: Children selectively explore when teachers are under-informative

et al. 2014

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Do children know when people tell the truth but not the whole truth? Here we show that children accurately evaluate informants who omit information and adjust their exploratory behavior to compensate for under-informative pedagogy. Experiment 1 shows that given identical demonstrations of a toy, children (6-and 7-year-olds) rate an informant lower if the toy also had non-demonstrated functions. Experiment 2 shows that given identical demonstrations, six-yearolds explore a toy more broadly if the informant previously committed a sin of omission. These results suggest that children consider both accuracy and informativeness in evaluating others' credibility and adjust their exploratory behavior to compensate for under-informative testimony when an informant's credibility is in doubt.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sins of omission: Children selectively explore when teachers are under-informative

et al. 2014

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“…[94] -are central in pragmatic inferences for both adults and children [95][96] and can be derived from the naïve utility calculus. Minimizing utterance length (communication costs) while maximizing information transfer to the listener (communicative rewards) can be seen as optimizing an overall utility function trading off these costs and rewards.…”

Section: Communication and Pedagogymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Naïve Utility Calculus: Computational Principles Underlying Commonsense Psychology

Jara‐Ettinger¹,

Gweon²,

Schulz³

et al. 2016

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

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We propose that human social cognition is structured around a basic understanding of ourselves and others as intuitive utility maximizers: From a young age, humans implicitly assume that agents choose goals and actions to maximize the rewards they expect to obtain relative to the costs they expect to incur. This "naïve utility calculus" lets both children and adults observe others' behavior and infer their beliefs and desires, their longer-term knowledge and preferences, and even their character: who is knowledgeable or competent, who is praiseworthy or blameworthy, who is friendly, indifferent or an enemy. We review studies providing support for the naïve utility calculus, and we show how it captures much of the rich social reasoning humans engage in from infancy. Commonsense PsychologyTheories of decision-making have been at the heart of psychology since the field's inception, but only recently has the field turned to the study of how humans -especially the youngest humansthink humans make decisions. When we watch someone make a choice, we explain it in terms of their goals, preferences, personalities, and moral beliefs. This capacity -our commonsense psychology -is the cognitive foundation of human society. It lets us share what we have and know, with those from whom we expect the same in return, and it guides how we evaluate those who deviate from our expectations.The representations and inferential power underlying commonsense psychology trace back to early childhood -before children begin kindergarten, and often even in infancy. Work on how children reason about other agents' goals [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8], desires [9][10][11], beliefs [12][13][14][15][16][17][18], and pro-social behavior [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29] has advanced our understanding of what in our commonsense psychology is at work in early infancy [30][31][32] and what develops [16][17][33][34][35]. Nonetheless, major theoretical questions remain unresolved. What computations underlie our commonsense psychology, and to what extent are they specific to the social domain? Are there a small number of general principles by which humans reason about and evaluate other agents, or do we instead learn a large number of special case rules and heuristics? To what extent is there continuity between the computations supporting commonsense psychology in infancy and later ages? Is children's social-cognitive development a progressive refinement of a computational system in place from birth, or are there fundamentally new computational principles coming into play?In this article we advance a hypothesis that offers answers to each of these questions, and provides a unifying framework in which to understand the diverse social-cognitive capacities we see even in young children. We propose that human beings, from early infancy, interpret others' intentional actions through the lens of a naïve utility calculus: that is, people assume that others choose actions to maximize utilities -the rewards they expect to obtain relative to the costs...

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“…However, it is not clear that scalar implicatures are as prevalent as this approach would have it (Paris, 1973;Geurts, 2009). The debate between (neo-)Griceanism and defaultism has been the subject of experimental work recently (Breheny et al, 2006;Huang & Snedeker, 2009;Grodner et al, 2010;Stiller et al, 2011), with suggestive but inconclusive results. 4 Conventional implicature Grice (1975) defines two major classes of meaning that are supposed to fall outside of "what is said (in the favored sense)": conversational implicatures, discussed above, and conventional implicatures.…”

Section: Defaultismmentioning

confidence: 99%