Recipient design in human communication: simple heuristics or perspective taking?

By Mark Blokpoel, M. V. van Kesteren, Arjen Stolk, Pim Haselager, Ivan Toni, I. V. van Rooij. 2012

51 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Humans have a remarkable capacity for tuning their communicative behaviors to different addressees, a phenomenon also known as recipient design. It remains unclear how this tuning of communicative behavior is implemented during live human interactions. Classical theories of communication postulate that recipient design involves perspective taking, i.e., the communicator selects her behavior based on her hypotheses about beliefs and knowledge of the recipient. More recently, researchers have argued that perspective taking is computationally too costly to be a plausible mechanism in everyday human communication. These researchers propose that computationally simple mechanisms, or heuristics, are exploited to perform recipient design. Such heuristics may be able to adapt communicative behavior to an addressee with no consideration for the addressee's beliefs and knowledge. To test whether the simpler of the two mechanisms is sufficient for explaining the “how” of recipient design we studied communicators' behaviors in the context of a non-verbal communicative task (the Tacit Communication Game, TCG). We found that the specificity of the observed trial-by-trial adjustments made by communicators is parsimoniously explained by perspective taking, but not by simple heuristics. This finding is important as it suggests that humans do have a computationally efficient way of taking beliefs and knowledge of a recipient into account.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

1. Robert R. Hoffman
2. Gary Klein
3. William J. Clancey
4. Abigail Emrey
5. Shane T. Mueller

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

1. Gary Klein
2. Robert R. Hoffman
3. Shane T. Mueller

Citations in the corpus

• Explanation in Human-AI Systems: A Literature Meta-Review, Synopsis of Key Ideas and Publications, and Bibliography for Explainable AI (2019, background): “…on human-automation teaming, communication, and explanation cover a range of topics (Ballas, 2007; Bisantz, Finger, Seong, and Llinas, 1999; Blokpoel et al., 2012; Cahour and Forzy, 2009; Clarke and Smyth, 1993; Davies, 2011; Dunbar, 1995; Frank et al., 2016; Groce et al., 2014; Hoffman,…”