We examined how listeners circumscribe referential domains for referring expressions by monitoring participant’s eye movements as they engaged in a referential communication task with another naïve participant.

abstract niklas luhmann was one of the prominent thinkers in the realm of sociology and the philosophy of social sciences. his approach was a systems approach. he classified the realm of reality and its entities into four groups that consisted of: machines, organisms, psychic systems, social systems. he belonged to the second wave of systemic thought and focused on the complexity and emergence ...

Referential communication is central to social and collective behaviour, for example honey bees communicating nectar locations each other or co-workers gossiping about a colleague. Since such behaviour typically considered be ‘representation hungry’, it often assumed require the possession of complex cognitive machinery capable manipulating symbolic representations world. However, series simula...

Explanations of category coherence include that categories reflect feature correlations in the world, that the human conceptual system is designed to create systematic categories, and that people have theories about the world that bind together seemingly unrelated features. The authors have suggested that the need to establish reference in communication also influences category coherence. This ...

This paper presents results from three experiments which investigate the evolution of referential communication in embodied dynamical agents. Agents, interacting with only simple sensors and motors, are evolved in a task which requires one agent to communicate the locations of spatially distant targets to another agent. The results from these experiments demonstrate a variety of successful comm...

Animal communication systems serve to transfer both motivational information--about the intentions or emotional state of the signaler--and referential information--about external objects. Although most animal calls seem to deal primarily with motivational information, those with a substantial referential component are particularly interesting because they invite comparison with words in human l...

This paper proposes a rational analysis of referential inference. Referential inference is involved whenever a speaker has to provide an utterance that will effect some action on the part of their listener—a situation that occurs constantly in everyday language use. Our rational analysis of referring makes certain assumptions about the goal, environment, and computational constraints involved i...