Hierarchical integration of communicative and visuospatial perspective-taking demands in sensorimotor control of referential pointing

Abstract

Recognised as a simple communicative behaviour, referential pointing is cognitively complex because it invites a communicator to consider the presumed knowledge of an addressee. Although previous work has shown that referential pointing is affected by addressees’ physical location, it remains unclear whether and how communicators’ inferences about addressees’ mental representation of the interaction space influence sensorimotor control of referential pointing. A novel Communicative Perspective-Taking task manipulated communicative and perspective-taking demands in communicators pointing to objects on a table while facing an addressee. Communicators had longer planning times in Level-2 than Level-1 perspective-taking trials, and longer holding times in communicative than non-communicative trials. The novel finding is that increasing both communicative and perspective-taking demands led to longer pointing trajectories, with an under-additive interaction between those two experimental factors. Participants generate communicative behaviours as informative as required, rather than overly exaggerated displays, by integrating communicative and perspective-taking information hierarchically, during sensorimotor control.

A conceptual framework for the study of demonstrative reference

“…These factors relate not to an entity's objective relative physical location or visibility, but to the cognitive status of the referent in the mind of the speaker and/or the addressee as assumed by the speaker. It is well established that language users typically take into account the presumed cognitive status of a referent in the addressee's situation model when using a referring expression in general (e.g., Chafe, 1976;Evans, Bergqvist, & San Roque, 2018;Gundel et al, 1993;Prince, 1981b) and when producing a communicative pointing gesture (Cleret de Langavant et al, 2011;Liu et al, 2019;Oosterwijk et al, 2017;Peeters et al, 2013;Winner et al, 2019). Important considerations for the speaker when selecting a demonstrative form may be whether the referent is in joint attention between speaker and addressee or not (Brown & Levinson, 2018;Burenhult, 2003;Evans et al, 2018;Herrmann, 2018;Knuchel, 2019;Küntay & Özyürek, 2006;Meira, 2018;Peeters, Azar, & Özyürek, 2014;Skarabela, Allen, & Scott-Phillips, 2013;Stevens & Zhang, 2013), whether it is considered perceptually, socially, and/or cognitively accessible to the addressee (Burenhult, 2008;Hanks, 2009;Jarbou, 2010;Piwek et al, 2008), and whether it can be considered in the psychologically construed shared space, the current interactional space, or within or outside the interlocutors' conceptually defined 'here-space' (Cutfield, 2018;Enfield, 2003Enfield, , 2018Jungbluth, 2003;Levinson, 2018;Meira & Guirardello-Damian, 2018;Opalka, 1982;.…”

“…Third, experimental studies have observed that speakers meticulously tailor the kinematics of their index-finger pointing gestures to the communicative needs of their addressees (e.g., Cleret de Langavant et al, 2011;Liu et al, 2019;Peeters, Chu, et al, 2015). For instance, speakers commonly lower the velocity of their pointing gesture, and keep their index finger in apex position for a significantly longer time interval, when a referent is assumed to be communicatively more relevant to the addressee (Peeters et al, 2013).…”

“…The collaborative nature of referring in face-to-face communication is also evident from its multimodal characteristics. When physically pointing at a visible referent-for instance, by using the index finger-speakers typically alternate gaze between referent and addressee (Bakeman & Adamson, 1984;Kita, 2003) and tailor the kinematic properties of their gesture (Cleret de Langavant et al, 2011;Liu, Bögels, Bird, Medendorp, & Toni, 2019;Peeters, Chu, et al, 2015) and the specificity of concurrently produced speech (Brennan & Clark, 1996;H. H. Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986;Koolen, Gatt, Goudbeek, & Krahmer, 2011) to the presumed informational needs of their addressee.…”

Oxytocin facilitates communicative adjustment by upregulating broadband aperiodic neural activity

“…It is known that communicators spontaneously integrate prior knowledge about their interlocutor with the ongoing communicative experience (Brennan et al, 2010;Clark & Krych, 2004;Hawkins et al, 2021;Kuhlen et al, 2012;Zhang et al, 2021). The behavioral finding of this study illustrates how oxytocin enhances that integration and facilitates the implementation of the Gricean Maxim of Quantity, namely producing utterances that convey no more information than necessary (Blokpoel et al, 2012;Brennan & Clark, 1996;de Ruiter et al, 2010;Garrod & Anderson, 1987;Grice, 1975;Levinson, 2000;Liu et al, 2019;Yoon & Brown-Schmidt, 2018). More generally, the finding supports the notion that oxytocin promotes exploration not only of other social agents (e.g.…”

“…This experiment builds on several studies showing that the time spent by communicators on a communicatively relevant referent provides a quantitative index of recipient design, in both laboratory and naturalistic contexts (Sacks et al, 1978;Newman-Norlund et al, 2009Noordzij et al, 2009Noordzij et al, , 2010Stolk, Hunnius, et al, 2013;Stolk, Verhagen, et al, 2013;Stolk et al, 2015;de Boer et al, 2017;Murillo Oosterwijk et al, 2017;Liu et al, 2019). Following previous studies using this experimental setup, we labeled the time spent by communicators on the relevant referent as Time on Target-Field, i.e.…”