ArticleiScience2025
Expectation violations as an effective alternative to complex mentalizing in novel communication.
Article in iScience, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Communicating without a shared language is often assumed to require cognitively demanding Theory of Mind reasoning. In this study, we tested whether a more parsimonious mechanism based on expectancy violations can achieve comparable performance. We tested this in the Tacit Communication Game, where we simulated Sender behavior using four computational models: the Surprise model based on expectancy violations and three levels of Theory of Mind. Human receivers interacted with each agent; we measured goal-identification accuracy and reaction times. The results show that Receivers paired with the Surprise model matched the accuracy of the most complex second level Theory of Mind agent and produced human-like message patterns. Models yielding higher accuracy also elicited faster responses, indicating lower cognitive load. These findings question the need for recursive mentalizing in unfamiliar interactions and highlight expectancy violation as a parsimonious route to efficient communication.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.