Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.
Department of Computer Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.
Nat Commun. 2022 Jul 18;13(1):4160. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-31716-3.
Humans often communicate using body movements like winks, waves, and nods. However, it is unclear how we identify when someone's physical actions are communicative. Given people's propensity to interpret each other's behavior as aimed to produce changes in the world, we hypothesize that people expect communicative actions to efficiently reveal that they lack an external goal. Using computational models of goal inference, we predict that movements that are unlikely to be produced when acting towards the world and, in particular, repetitive ought to be seen as communicative. We find support for our account across a variety of paradigms, including graded acceptability tasks, forced-choice tasks, indirect prompts, and open-ended explanation tasks, in both market-integrated and non-market-integrated communities. Our work shows that the recognition of communicative action is grounded in an inferential process that stems from fundamental computations shared across different forms of action interpretation.
人类通常通过眨眼、挥手和点头等身体动作进行交流。然而，我们并不清楚自己是如何识别他人的身体动作是否具有交际意图。鉴于人们倾向于将彼此的行为解释为旨在改变世界，我们假设人们期望交际行为能够有效地表明它们缺乏外部目标。我们使用目标推断的计算模型进行预测，那些不太可能在对世界采取行动时产生的动作，特别是重复性动作，应该被视为具有交际意图。我们在各种范式中都得到了对我们的解释的支持，包括可接受性等级任务、强制性选择任务、间接提示和开放式解释任务，这些范式涵盖了市场整合和非市场整合的社区。我们的工作表明，交际行为的识别是基于一种推理过程，这种过程源于不同形式的动作解释所共有的基本计算。
