{"pk":25963,"title":"Invertible signals: A challenge for theories of communication","subtitle":null,"abstract":"We used a novel experimental paradigm to investigate cognitive principles underpinning human communication.\nThrough a computer game simulating different virtual scenes, pairs of participants sent and interpreted non-linguistic, minimal\nsignals to achieve common goals. Participants’ signalling and interpretative actions demonstrated both flexibility and sensitivity\nto variations in the context of the shared visual scene: the same signal in one context could ‘flip’ its meaning in a new context.\nSuch ‘invertible’ signals in the lab have their counterparts in patterns of real-world natural language use—from the phenomenon\nof enantiosemy (words/phrases that contain their ‘opposite’ meaning) to the pragmatics of satire and irony. But the emergence of\nsuch signals in our experiment challenges both correlational associative and recursive-mentalizing (‘mind-reading’) accounts\nof human communication and language. Instead, we point to a pragmatics-central perspective in which what is vital is our\ncapacity for joint inference and coordination.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Member Abstracts","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/53s754cv","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Jennifer","middle_name":"","last_name":"Misyak","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Warwick","department":""},{"first_name":"Takao","middle_name":"","last_name":"Noguchi","name_suffix":"","institution":"University College London","department":""},{"first_name":"Nick","middle_name":"","last_name":"Chater","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Warwick","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2015-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/25963/galley/15587/download/"}]}