Interacting Timescales in Perspective-Taking

Neural correlates involved in perspective-taking in early childhood

Learning to consider another person's perspective is pivotal in early social development. Still, little is known about the neural underpinnings involved in perspective-taking in early childhood. In this EEG study, we examined 4-year-old children's brain activity during a live, social interaction that involved perspective-taking. Children were asked to pass one of two toys to another person. To decide which toy to pass, they had to consider either their partner's perspective (perspective-taking) or visual features unrelated to their partner's perspective (control). We analyzed power changes in midfrontal and temporal-parietal EEG channels. The results indicated that children showed higher power around 7 Hz at right temporal-parietal channels for perspective-taking compared to control trials. This power difference was positively correlated with children's perspective-taking performance, specifically for trials in which they needed to pass the toy their partner could not see. A similar power difference at right temporal-parietal channels was seen when comparing perspective-taking trials where children's visual access mismatched rather than matched that of their partner. No differences were detected for midfrontal channels. In sum, we identified distinct neural activity as 4-year-olds considered another person's perspective in a live interaction; this activity converges with neural findings of adults' social processing network.

(Mis)align: a simple dynamic framework for modeling interpersonal coordination

As people coordinate in daily interactions, they engage in different patterns of behavior to achieve successful outcomes. This includes both synchrony-the temporal coordination of the same behaviors at the same time-and complementarity-the coordination of the same or different behaviors that may occur at different relative times. Using computational methods, we develop a simple framework to describe the interpersonal dynamics of behavioral synchrony and complementarity over time, and explore their task-dependence. A key feature of this framework is the inclusion of a task context that mediates interactions, and consists of active, inactive, and inhibitory constraints on communication. Initial simulation results show that these task constraints can be a robust predictor of simulated agents' behaviors over time. We also show that the framework can reproduce some general patterns observed in human interaction data. We describe preliminary theoretical implications from these results, and relate them to broader proposals of synergistic self-organization in communication.

Learning about others: Modeling social inference through ambiguity resolution

Bayesian accounts of social cognition successfully model the human ability to infer goals and intentions of others on the basis of their behavior. In this paper, we extend this paradigm to the analysis of ambiguity resolution during brief communicative exchanges. In a reference game experimental setup, we observed that participants were able to infer listeners' preferences when analyzing their choice of object given referential ambiguity. Moreover, a subset of speakers was able to strategically choose ambiguous over unambiguous utterances in an epistemic manner, although a different group preferred unambiguous utterances. We show that a modified Rational Speech Act model well-approximates the data of both the inference of listeners' preferences and their utterance choices. In particular, the observed preference inference is modeled by Bayesian inference, which computes posteriors over hypothetical, behavior-influencing inner states of conversation partners-such as their knowledge, beliefs, intentions, or preferences-after observing their utterance-interpretation behavior. Utterance choice is modeled by anticipating social information gain, which we formalize as the expected knowledge change, when choosing a particular utterance and watching the listener's response. Taken together, our results demonstrate how social conversations allow us to (sometimes strategically) learn about each other when observing interpretations of ambiguous utterances.

What is retained about common ground? Distinct effects of linguistic and visual co-presence

Common ground can be mutually established between conversational partners in several ways. We examined whether the modality (visual or linguistic) with which speakers share information with their conversational partners results in memory traces that affect subsequent references addressed to a particular partner. In 32 triads, directors arranged a set of tangram cards with one matcher and then with another, but in different modalities, sharing some cards only linguistically (by describing cards the matcher couldn't see), some only visually (by silently showing them), some both linguistically and visually, and others not at all. Then directors arranged the cards again in separate rounds with each matcher. The modality with which they previously established common ground about a particular card with a particular matcher (e.g., linguistically with one partner and visually with the other) affected subsequent referring: References to cards previously shared only visually included more idea units, words, and reconceptualizations than those shared only linguistically, which in turn included more idea units, words, and reconceptualizations than those shared both linguistically and visually. Moreover, speakers were able to tailor references to the same card appropriately to the distinct modality shared with each addressee. Such gradient, partner-specific adaptation during re-referring suggests that memory encodes rich-enough representations of multimodal shared experiences to effectively cue relevant constraints about the perceptual conditions under which speakers and addressees establish common ground.

Do People Regard Robots as Human-Like Social Partners? Evidence From Perspective-Taking in Spatial Descriptions

Spatial communications are essential to the survival and social interaction of human beings. In science fiction and the near future, robots are supposed to be able to understand spatial languages to collaborate and cooperate with humans. However, it remains unknown whether human speakers regard robots as human-like social partners. In this study, human speakers describe target locations to an imaginary human or robot addressee under various scenarios varying in relative speaker–addressee cognitive burden. Speakers made equivalent perspective choices to human and robot addressees, which consistently shifted according to the relative speaker–addressee cognitive burden. However, speakers’ perspective choice was only significantly correlated to their social skills when the addressees were humans but not robots. These results suggested that people generally assume robots and humans with equal capabilities in understanding spatial descriptions but do not regard robots as human-like social partners.

Why are listeners sometimes (but not always) egocentric? Making inferences about using others' perspective in referential communication

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to understand others’ mental states, and that these mental states can differ from our own. Although healthy adults have little trouble passing conceptual tests of ToM (e.g., the false belief task [1]), they do not always succeed in using ToM [2,3]. In order to be successful in referential communication, listeners need to correctly infer the way in which a speaker’s perspective constrains reference and inhibit their own perspective accordingly. However, listeners may require prompts to take these effortful inferential steps. The current study investigated the possibility of embedding prompts in the instructions for listeners to make inference about using a speaker’s perspective. Experiment 1 showed that provision of a clear introductory example of the full chain of inferences resulted in large improvement in performance. Residual egocentric errors suggested that the improvement was not simply due to superior comprehension of the instructions. Experiment 2 further dissociated the effect by placing selective emphasis on making inference about inhibiting listeners’ own perspective versus using the speaker’s perspective. Results showed that only the latter had a significant effect on successful performance. The current findings clearly demonstrated that listeners do not readily make inferences about using speakers’ perspectives, but can do so when prompted.