Common ground: Testing a cultural evolutionary theory

Objetivo

Human communication is built around interlocutors’ common ground (CG), or the information they assume to share. Despite having been the focus of intense interdisciplinary research for more than 60 years, we do not yet understand what the cognitive bases of CG are, nor how it works. This ERC project introduces an innovative approach that is essential to understanding CG: I propose to test and develop the first cultural evolutionary theory of CG. I argue that CG is a cognitive technology that emerges from the interaction of three cognitive capacities in a positive reinforcement cycle: joint attention, joint memory, and the use of reference systems.

The project has three ambitious objectives: [1] Develop a cultural evolutionary theory of CG that is cognitively sound and empirically testable. [2] Design new experimental methods with high ecological validity to investigate CG development in language acquisition and CG formation through social interaction. [3] Collect memory and multimodal language data from several cultures to identify universal features of CG development and formation, and cross-linguistic differences in CG management. These objectives will be addressed in four work packages: WPs 1-3 will employ cutting-edge methods to investigate CG development, formation, and management, while WP4 will focus on theoretical and computational modelling.

The key innovation in COMMON_GROUND is to immerse children and adults in shared experiences in order to investigate CG formation through naturalistic social interaction. Multimodal data will be recorded during these interactions to establish how joint attention and reference shape joint memory. Analyzing later conversations about these shared experiences will further allow us to investigate CG management across ages, languages, and cultures. These studies will be the first to advance our understanding of CG as a cognitive technology, informing diverse disciplines ranging from Philosophy to AI.

Ámbito científico (EuroSciVoc)

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