The Division of Labor in Communication: Speakers Help Listeners Account for Asymmetries in Visual Perspective

Abstract

Recent debates over adults' theory of mind use have been fueled by surprising failures of perspective‐taking in communication, suggesting that perspective‐taking may be relatively effortful. Yet adults routinely engage in effortful processes when needed. How, then, should speakers and listeners allocate their resources to achieve successful communication? We begin with the observation that the shared goal of communication induces a natural division of labor: The resources one agent chooses to allocate toward perspective‐taking should depend on their expectations about the other's allocation. We formalize this idea in a resource‐rational model augmenting recent probabilistic weighting accounts with a mechanism for (costly) control over the degree of perspective‐taking. In a series of simulations, we first derive an intermediate degree of perspective weighting as an optimal trade‐off between expected costs and benefits of perspective‐taking. We then present two behavioral experiments testing novel predictions of our model. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the presence or absence of occlusions in a director–matcher task. We found that speakers spontaneously modulated the informativeness of their descriptions to account for “known unknowns” in their partner's private view, reflecting a higher degree of speaker perspective‐taking than previously acknowledged. In Experiment 2, we then compared the scripted utterances used by confederates in prior work with those produced in interactions with unscripted directors. We found that confederates were systematically less informative than listeners would initially expect given the presence of occlusions, but listeners used violations to adaptively make fewer errors over time. Taken together, our work suggests that people are not simply “mindblind”; they use contextually appropriate expectations to navigate the division of labor with their partner. We discuss how a resource‐rational framework may provide a more deeply explanatory foundation for understanding flexible perspective‐taking under processing constraints.

(Over)Estimating Shared Cultural Knowledge: Evidence for early use of a knowledge prediction heuristic in children

“…show no difference in their perspective-taking between their caregiver and a stranger. This finding would be consistent with the idea that adults typically bear most of the communicative labour when communicating with children, meaning that children do not feel a difference in their need to perspective-take when communicating with adults (even if the specific adults may vary in how much knowledge they share with the child; Hawkins et al, 2020). However, it is possible that only specific kinds of shared knowledge may influence children's perspective-taking with a partner (i.e., knowledge of prior shared events or experiences) or that feelings of closeness with a partner may influence children's perspectivetaking.…”

“…This may mean that though children do predict shared cultural knowledge and consider the perspectives of their communicative partner, shared knowledge predictions may not influence the perspective-taking process in the same way that it appears to for adults. Additionally, it is possible that adults typically bear most of the communicative labour when communicating with children (i.e., actively tailor their communication to a child's perspective), meaning that children may often experience successful communication even without needing to perspective-take themselves (Hawkins et al, 2020). This could lead to the effect of shared knowledge on perspective-taking being less pronounced in children, given their experiences of successful communication without considering a partner's knowledge or perspective.…”

“…A resource-rational model of perspective-taking argues that we are more likely to actively perspective-take when we judge that it is necessary throughout communication (Hawkins et al, 2020). We may quickly predict how much information is in common ground in order to decide when to actively consider a partner's perspective, thus explaining some of the variation in perspective-taking performance.…”

“…Thus, establishing a bank of shared knowledge with a partner may in fact alter how likely we are to consider their perspective. A resource-rational model of perspective-taking during communication (Hawkins et al, 2020) may predict that we would show increased perspective-taking for a partner with whom we share little prior common ground. With little prior information about common ground or shared experiences, we may experience a heightened feeling of need to perspective-take when communicating with a dissimilar other.…”

Maintaining Common Ground in Dynamic Environments

“…We also expect the incorporation of pragmatic reasoning to be a fruitful area of future research. One representative approach is the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework (Goodman and Frank, 2016), which has been applied in both continuous (Monroe et al, 2017) and partially observable domains (Hawkins et al, 2021). However, application in dynamic domains would involve additional complexities that need to be taken into account, such as the dependencies on previous common ground.…”