Perspective-taking behavior as the probabilistic weighing of multiple domains

Heller, Daphna; Parisien, Christopher; Stevenson, Suzanne

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2015.12.008

Cited by 83 publications

(114 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…Following the multiple perspectives account of Heller et al. (), we propose that these results indicate that speakers do not categorically use either their own perspective or the addressee's perspective, but instead simultaneously consider both perspectives when choosing referring expressions.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 87%

“…It is not clear how language users could directly estimate this probability; thus, following standard practice, Heller et al. () use Bayes rule to rewrite P ( obj|RE ) as a product of two probabilities, P ( RE|obj ) and P ( obj ), each of which can be estimated more naturally (cf. Frank & Goodman, ; and other probabilistic approaches to pragmatics) .…”

Section: The Probabilistic Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Heller et al. () show that both sets of results can be achieved by the HPS model if the egocentric domain (i.e., the addressee's perspective) and the common ground domain are weighed about equally in formula . This provides evidence for the simultaneous weighing of two perspectives in the comprehension of referring expressions.…”

Section: The Probabilistic Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In Section 2, we generalize the probabilistic model of Heller et al. () and extend it to language production.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Modeling Reference Production as the Probabilistic Combination of Multiple Perspectives

2018

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While speakers have been shown to adapt to the knowledge state of their addressee in choosing referring expressions, they often also show some egocentric tendencies. The current paper aims to provide an explanation for this "mixed" behavior by presenting a model that derives such patterns from the probabilistic combination of both the speaker's and the addressee's perspectives. To test our model, we conducted a language production experiment, in which participants had to refer to objects in a context that also included a visually misleading object (e.g., a crayon shaped like a Lego brick) whose function was either known to both partners, or known just to the speaker but not the addressee. Modeling results indicate that the experimental findings cannot be explained by assuming that speakers tailor a referring expression solely to their own perspective or to the perspective of their addressee. Instead, accounting for the behavioral pattern requires an approach where both perspectives influence the choice of referring expressions. Nevertheless, in our situation, speakers consider their partner's perspective more than their own.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 87%

Section: The Probabilistic Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Probabilistic Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In Section 2, we generalize the probabilistic model of Heller et al. () and extend it to language production.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Modeling Reference Production as the Probabilistic Combination of Multiple Perspectives

2018

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“…In dialogue, speakers can, in some circumstances, design utterances to accommodate the addressee's physical perspective (Heller, Parisien, & Stevenson, 2016;Nadig & Sedivy, 2002;Schober, 1993), particularly when doing so is advantageous to communicative goals (Yoon, Koh, & Brown-Schmidt, 2012). For example, when seated at a dining room table, each person has a different perspective on the scene-for one person, the pepper is to the left of the salt; for another, the pepper is in front of the salt.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contextual Integration in Multiparty Audience Design

Yoon

Brown‐Schmidt

2019

Cognitive Science

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Communicating with multiple addressees poses a problem for speakers: Each addressee necessarily comes to the conversation with a different perspective-different knowledge, different beliefs, and a distinct physical context. Despite the ubiquity of multiparty conversation in everyday life, little is known about the processes by which speakers design language in multiparty conversation. While prior evidence demonstrates that speakers design utterances to accommodate addressee knowledge in multiparty conversation, it is unknown if and how speakers encode and combine different types of perspective information. Here we test whether speakers encode the perspective of multiple addressees, and then simultaneously consider their knowledge and physical context during referential design in a three-party conversation. Analyses of referential form-expression length, disfluency, and elaboration rate-in an interactive multiparty conversation demonstrate that speakers do take into consideration both addressee knowledge and physical context when designing utterances, consistent with a knowledge-scene integration view. These findings point to an audience design process that takes as input multiple types of representations about the perspectives of multiple addressees, and that bases the informational content of the to-be-designed utterance on a combination of the perspectives of the intended addressees. process involves considerations of the likely knowledge and beliefs of a single addressee -tailoring what is said to their perspective. When we consider the case of multiparty conversation, however, this process becomes decidedly more complex. Consider that each individual necessarily brings to the conversation different knowledge and beliefs (due to different life experiences), and a distinct physical context (as two people cannot occupy the same place at the same time). Thus, when simultaneously addressing two or more addressees, the speaker must design what they will say for a group of addressees who have different communicative needs due to their distinct perspectives. The current literature contains only a small number of studies examining audience design in multiparty conversation, and as a result, very little is known about if or how this process unfolds. In a new line of research, we have begun to ask basic mechanistic questions about how speakers design language for groups of addressees who differ in their background knowledge for the topic at hand. The present research builds on these findings to explore if and how speakers take into consideration two different types of perspective informationknowledge and physical context-in multiparty audience design.A classic paradigm for examining audience design is the referential communication task, in which pairs of participants work together to rearrange a set of abstract images multiple times (Krauss & Weinheimer, 1964, 1966. In this task, the conversational partners jointly create brief labels for these images across the course of the conversation

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