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1. Effectively Learning from Pedagogical Demonstrations

   Ho, Mark K; Littman, Michael L.; Cushman, Fiery; Austerweil, Joseph L. (January 2018, Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society)

   When observing others’ behavior, people use Theory of Mind to infer unobservable beliefs, desires, and intentions. And when showing what activity one is doing, people will modify their behavior in order to facilitate more accurate interpretation and learning by an observer. Here, we present a novel model of how demonstrators act and observers interpret demonstrations corresponding to different levels of recursive social reasoning (i.e. a cognitive hierarchy) grounded in Theory of Mind. Our model can explain how demonstrators show others how to perform a task and makes predictions about how sophisticated observers can reason about communicative intentions. Additionally, we report an experiment that tests (1) how well an observer can learn from demonstrations that were produced with the intent to communicate, and (2) how an observer’s interpretation of demonstrations influences their judgments. 

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2. People infer communicative action through an expectation for efficient communication

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-31716-3  

   Royka, Amanda; Chen, Annie; Aboody, Rosie; Huanca, Tomas; Jara-Ettinger, Julian (December 2022, Nature Communications)

   Abstract 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. 

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3. Aerial Flight Paths for Communication

   https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2021.719154  

   Bevins, Alisha; Duncan, Brittany A. (December 2021, Frontiers in Robotics and AI)

   This article presents an understanding of naive users’ perception of the communicative nature of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) motions refined through an iterative series of studies. This includes both what people believe the UAV is trying to communicate, and how they expect to respond through physical action or emotional response. Previous work in this area prioritized gestures from participants to the vehicle or augmenting the vehicle with additional communication modalities, rather than communicating without clear definitions of the states attempting to be conveyed. In an attempt to elicit more concrete states and better understand specific motion perception, this work includes multiple iterations of state creation, flight path refinement, and label assignment. The lessons learned in this work will be applicable broadly to those interested in defining flight paths, and within the human-robot interaction community as a whole, as it provides a base for those seeking to communicate using non-anthropomorphic robots. We found that the Negative Attitudes towards Robots Scale (NARS) can be an indicator of how a person is likely to react to a UAV, the emotional content they are likely to perceive from a message being conveyed, and it is an indicator for the personality characteristics they are likely to project upon the UAV. We also see that people commonly associate motions from other non-verbal communication situations onto UAVs. Flight specific recommendations are to use a dynamic retreating motion from a person to encourage following, use a perpendicular motion to their field of view for blocking, simple descending motion for landing, and to use either no motion or large altitude changes to encourage watching. Overall, this research explores the communication from the UAV to the bystander through its motion, to see how people respond physically and emotionally. 

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4. Understanding Miscommunication: Speech Act Recognition in Digital Contexts

   https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13023  

   Holtgraves, Thomas (October 2021, Cognitive Science)

   Abstract Successful language use requires accurate intention recognition. However, sometimes this can be undermined because communication occurs within an interpersonal context. In this research, I used a relatively large set of speech acts (n= 32) and explored how variability in their inherent face‐threat influences the extent to which they are successfully recognized by a recipient, as well as the confidence of senders and receivers in their communicative success. Participants in two experiments either created text messages (senders) designed to perform a specific speech act (e.g., agree) or interpreted those text messages (receivers) in terms of the specific speech act being performed. The speech acts were scaled in terms of their degree of face threat. In both experiments, speech acts that were more threatening were less likely to be correctly recognized than those that were less threatening. Additionally, the messages of the more threatening speech acts were longer and lower in clout than the less threatening speech acts. Senders displayed greater confidence in communicative success than receivers, but judgments of communicative success (for both senders and receivers) were unrelated to actual communicative success. The implications of these results for our understanding of actual communicative episodes are discussed. 

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5. Using social norms to explain giving behavior

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-023-09811-z  

   Eckel, Catherine_C; Hoover, Hanna_G; Krupka, Erin_L; Sinha, Nishita; Wilson, Rick_K (October 2023, Experimental Economics)

   Abstract Transfers of resources in dictator games vary significantly by the characteristics of recipients. We focus on social norms and demonstrate that variation in the recipient changes both giving and injunctive norms and may offer an explanation for differences in giving. We elicit generosity using dictator games, and social norms using incentivized coordination games, with two different recipient types: an anonymous student and a charitable organization. A within-subjects design ensures that other factors are held constant. Our results show that differences in giving behavior are closely related to differences in social norms of giving across contexts. Controlling for individual differences in beliefs about the norm, subjects do not weight compliance with the norms in the student recipient or charity recipient dictator game differently. These results suggest that the impact of context on giving co-occurs with an impact on social norms. 

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