Perspective-Taking in Conversation

Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN

Investigators

Abstract

Imagine taking your seat in an airplane and after exchanging pleasantries, your seatmate tells you that they are a pilot. At this point, you might ask the person something about what it's like to fly a plane or perhaps about where they learned to fly. But where would that conversation have gone if your seatmate instead told you she is a stay-at-home mom? In that case, you might ask how many children she has, their ages, etc. That is, we can change the course of a conversation “on-the-fly” in an informed and principled way, making inferences and calculations about what other people might know and believe. Yet we know little about the cognitive mechanisms that guide interactive conversation. To date, most of the literature on conversational interaction focuses on the information that the conversational partners know they share, also called the "common ground." But how do we discover what information we share with a conversational partner? And how do we figure out what information we probably don't share? In this project, the investigator uses behavioral experiments to determine how people form detailed, probabilistic representations of what their conversational partner might know, as compared with what they themselves know. Findings will provide insight into how these representations are used during conversational interactions and how they influence memory for conversation. This research probes the cognitive mechanisms that allow people to engage in everyday conversation by exploring the idea that conversational partners represent their own perspective in a situation, form a representation of their partner's perspective, and compare the two, in order to determine the differences and similarities. Twelve proposed experiments test predictions of this perspective-comparison hypothesis and will provide insights into how conversational partners ask and answer questions and how memory for conversation is shaped. Broader impacts of the work include research training for graduate students and a large cohort of undergraduates. In addition, several high school students will participate in the research process from start to finish. Students from under-represented and minoritized groups are recruited locally and nationally. De-identified data and code will be made publicly available along with study pre-registrations. Findings will advance understanding of psychological and linguistic processes, advance the design of computerized dialog systems, and offer insights into pedagogical research. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.