Presenter(s): Aaron Macarthur
Faculty Mentor(s): Dare Baldwin & Netanel Weinstein
Oral Session 3 C
Reaching shared understanding in conversation is an important part of daily life. Various mechanisms facilitate this achievement including: the ability to engage in perspective taking, sensitivity to gaze, sharing attention, and making pragmatic inferences about an interlocutor’s intent. Prior research on this topic has prioritized experimental control over ecological validity by placing participants in highly constrained situations. We addressed these limitations in the present study by correlating performance in a modified referential communication task with participants’ performance on several standard personality and socio-cognitive measures. Specifically, pairs of participants were placed on either side of a shelf with a series of cells and prepared a cake from a given recipe card. Some of the cells on the shelf were visible to only one participant or the other, while some cells were visible to both. We measured participants use of various disambiguation strategies (e.g. gaze checking or making a clarification request) and examine whether performance on standard socio-cognitive measures predict these behaviors. This research helped shed light on the relationship between standard decontextualized socio- cognitive measures and real-life social interaction as well as the extent to which these measures predict individual differences in the way people achieve shared understanding in conversation.