Shades of confusion: Lexical uncertainty modulates ad hoc coordination in an interactive communication task

TL;DR

This study investigates how lexical uncertainty influences ad hoc coordination in communication, showing that variability in associations affects initial accuracy but improves with adaptive conventions, highlighting the role of uncertainty management.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel color-concept association task to examine lexical priors and demonstrates how uncertainty impacts communication success and adaptation.

Findings

Associations are more variable for abstract concepts.

Uncertainty within individuals predicts shared expectations.

Communication accuracy improves with ad hoc convention formation.

Abstract

There is substantial variability in the expectations that communication partners bring into interactions, creating the potential for misunderstandings. To directly probe these gaps and our ability to overcome them, we propose a communication task based on color-concept associations. In Experiment 1, we establish several key properties of the mental representations of these expectations, or lexical priors, based on recent probabilistic theories. Associations are more variable for abstract concepts, variability is represented as uncertainty within each individual, and uncertainty enables accurate predictions about whether others are likely to share the same association. In Experiment 2, we then examine the downstream consequences of these representations for communication. Accuracy is initially low when communicating about concepts with more variable associations, but rapidly increases as participants form ad hoc conventions. Together, our findings suggest that people cope with variability by maintaining well-calibrated uncertainty about their partner and appropriately adaptable representations of their own.