ArticleNature communications2022
People infer communicative action through an expectation for efficient communication.
Article in Nature communications, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Action Feedback Enables Novices to Implicitly Acquire Task Regularities from Experts During Joint Statistical Learning.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Expectation violations as an effective alternative to complex mentalizing in novel communication.iScience · 2025Article
- The temporal context of eye contact influences perceptions of communicative intent.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Expectation violations signal goals in novel human communication.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Towards fluid human-agent collaboration: From dynamic collaboration patterns to models of theory of mind reasoning.Frontiers in robotics and AI · 2025Article
- Seeing and understanding epistemic actions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Infants are sensitive to the social signaling value of shared inefficient behaviors.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Not Playing by the Rules: Exploratory Play, Rational Action, and Efficient Search.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.