Communication and familiarity

How do we integrate category familiarity and expectations about communication to determine when and how to generalize new information?

How do prior knowledge about kinds of objects and expectations about communication interact? The Natural Pedagogy theory (Csibra & Gergely, 2009) claims that infants tend to believe that information conveyed through communication is about whole object kinds (e.g., infants learn that balls bounce by seeing a demonstrator convey this information through a single exemplar of this kind). However, these inferences about kinds may depend on their prior knowledge and expectations of useful information from a teacher. We are interested in developing formal computational models of these socio-cognitive processes as well as ways to empirically test how infants interpret communicative acts as a function of familiarity and their expectations about communication about objects.

Team members:

• Otávio Mattos
• Emma McEwen
• Marianna Zhang
• Pablo León-Villagrá
• Mark Ho