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How do drawings—ranging from detailed illustrations to schematic diagrams—reliably convey meaning? Do viewers understand drawings based on how strongly they resemble an entity (i.e., as images) or based on socially mediated conventions (i.e., as symbols)? Here we evaluate a cognitive account of pictorial meaning in which visual and social information jointly support visual communication. Pairs of participants used drawings to repeatedly communicate the identity of a target object among multiple distractor objects. We manipulated social cues across three experiments and a full replication, finding that participants developed object-specific and interaction-specific strategies for communicating more efficiently over time, beyond what task practice or a resemblance-based account alone could explain. Leveraging model-based image analyses and crowdsourced annotations, we further determined that drawings did not drift toward “arbitrariness,” as predicted by a pure convention-based account, but preserved visually diagnostic features. Taken together, these findings advance psychological theories of how successful graphical conventions emerge.

 

Language is a remarkably efficient tool for transmitting information. Yet human speakers make statements that are inefficient, imprecise, or even contrary to their own beliefs, all in the service of being polite. What rational machinery underlies polite language use? Here, we show that polite speech emerges from the competition of three communicative goals: to convey information, to be kind, and to present oneself in a good light. We formalize this goal tradeoff using a probabilistic model of utterance production, which predicts human utterance choices in socially sensitive situations with high quantitative accuracy, and we show that our full model is superior to its variants with subsets of the three goals. This utility-theoretic approach to speech acts takes a step toward explaining the richness and subtlety of social language use. 

Despite their diversity, languages around the world share a consistent set of properties and distributional regularities. For example, the distribution of word frequencies, the distribution of syntactic dependency lengths, and the presence of ambiguity are all remarkably consistent across languages. We discuss a framework for studying how these system‐level properties emerge from local, in‐the‐moment interactions of rational, pragmatic speakers and listeners. To do so, we derive a novel objective function for measuring the communicative efficiency of linguistic systems in terms of the interactions of speakers and listeners. We examine the behavior of this objective in a series of simulations focusing on the communicative function of ambiguity in language. These simulations suggest that rational pragmatic agents will produce communicatively efficient systems and that interactions between such agents provide a framework for examining efficient properties of language structure and use more broadly.