Tauzin Tibor, Call Josep, Gergely György
Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University.
Institute of Linguistics, University of Vienna.
Open Mind (Camb). 2024 Oct 4;8:1228-1246. doi: 10.1162/opmi_a_00166. eCollection 2024.
Pragmatic theories assume that during communicative exchanges humans strive to be optimally informative and spontaneously adjust their communicative signals to satisfy their addressee's inferred epistemic needs. For instance, when necessary, adults flexibly and appropriately modify their communicative gestures to provide their partner the relevant information she lacks about the situation. To investigate this ability in infants, we designed a cooperative task in which 18-month-olds were asked to point at the target object they wanted to receive. In Experiment 1, we found that when their desired object was placed behind a distractor object, infants appropriately modified their prototypical pointing to avoid mistakenly indicating the distractor to their partner. When the objects were covered, and their cooperative partner had no information (Experiment 2) or incorrect information (Experiment 3) about the target's location - as opposed to being knowledgeable about it - infants pointed differentially more often at the target and employed modified pointing gestures more frequently as a function of the amount of relevant information that their partner needed to retrieve their desired object from its correct location. These findings demonstrate that when responding to a verbal request in a cooperative task 18-month-old infants can take into account their communicative partner's epistemic states and when necessary provide her with the relevant information she lacks through sufficiently informative deictic gestures. Our results indicate that infants possess an early emerging, species-unique cognitive adaptation specialized for communicative mindreading and pragmatic inferential communication which enable the efficient exchange of relevant information between communicating social partners in cooperative contexts.
实用主义理论认为，在交流互动过程中，人类会努力提供最优信息，并自发调整其交流信号，以满足听话者推断出的认知需求。例如，必要时，成年人会灵活且适当地调整他们的交流手势，以便为对方提供她所缺乏的有关情境的相关信息。为了研究婴儿的这种能力，我们设计了一项合作任务，要求18个月大的婴儿指向他们想要得到的目标物体。在实验1中，我们发现，当他们想要的物体被放置在一个干扰物体后面时，婴儿会适当地调整他们典型的指向动作，以避免错误地向对方指出干扰物体。当物体被遮盖起来，且他们的合作伙伴对目标物体的位置没有信息（实验2）或有错误信息（实验3）——与了解目标物体位置的情况相反——婴儿会根据对方从正确位置取回他们想要的物体所需的相关信息量，更频繁地指向目标物体，并更频繁地使用调整后的指向手势。这些发现表明，在合作任务中回应口头请求时，18个月大的婴儿能够考虑到他们交流伙伴的认知状态，并在必要时通过提供足够信息的指示手势，为对方提供她所缺乏的相关信息。我们的研究结果表明，婴儿拥有一种早期出现的、物种独特的认知适应能力，专门用于交际性心理解读和语用推理交流，这使得在合作情境中进行交流的社会伙伴之间能够有效地交换相关信息。
