Abstract
Pragmatic theories of communication assume that humans evolved a species-unique inferential capacity to express and recognize intentions via communicative actions. We show that 13-month-old non-verbal infants can interpret the turn-taking exchange of variable tone sequences between unfamiliar agents as indicative of communicative transfer of goal-relevant information from a knowledgeable to a naïve agent pursuing the goal. No such inference of information transfer was drawn by the infants, however, when a) the agents exchanged fully predictable identical signal sequences, which does not enable transmission of new information, or b) when no goal-relevant contextual change was observed that would motivate its communicative transmission. These results demonstrate that young infants can recognize communicative interactions between third-party agents and possess an evolved capacity for communicative mind-reading that enables them to infer what contextually relevant information has been transmitted between the agents even without language.
Highlights
Humans are a highly social species specially adapted to engage in powerful forms of epistemic cooperation by exploiting their species-unique capacities for communicative information transmission
It has been hypothesized that humans evolved special preparedness to recognize certain intentional actions as ostensive communicative acts: i.e., as actions ostensively performed by an agent with the communicative intention to make manifest relevant information about a referent for the addressee to infer[3,5]
We demonstrated this in 13-month-old infants who observed two agents engage in a contingent turn-taking exchange of variable and unfamiliar signal sequences, which they recognized as indicative of communicative information transfer
Summary
Our results provide support for the evolutionary-based pragmatic account of ostensive-inferential communication[1,2,3] showing that even without language young infants can recognize ostensive communicative acts and infer the relevant information conveyed by communicative agents in a particular context. Such communication-based belief attributions could be induced in 13-month-olds only in a context where they observed a goal-relevant situational change, which they represented as being the relevant new information that should be conveyed to the naïve goal-pursuing agent by a cooperative and knowledgeable communicative partner These results provide support for the pragmatic inferential approach to ostensive communication by demonstrating that even young human infants are capable of communicative mindreading, recognize communicative information transfer based on contingent exchange of variable signals, attribute communicative agency and infer the relevant content of the informative intentions of others without language
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