Speaker: Peng Qian (Harvard / MIT)
Title: The Cognitive Basis of Flexible Communication: Two Case Studies
Abstract: Distinctively human social life builds on our capacity to communicate flexibly. In this talk, I will present two case studies on the computations in the human mind that support flexible use of language. I begin with a targeted case study showing how native speakers follow principles of noisy-channel inference in resolving subject-verb agreement mismatches such as “The gift for the kids are hidden under the bed”. Results suggest that native-speakers’ inferences reflect both prior expectations and structure-sensitive conditioning of error probabilities consistent with the statistics of the language production environment. I then present a study on people’s preferences in playfully using physical objects to stand for ideas in the mind, such as pretending a turned-over bottle is a car. I show that people’s construction of such visual pretense is flexible but not arbitrary, and better predicted by spatial and physical alignment (specifically shape similarity) over surface feature similarity (such as color) between the real and pretend objects. Moreover, people systematically align the object subpart structure, which are not accounted for by the current multi-modal language-vision models.