The role of joint utility and pragmatic reasoning in cooperative communication

2025-04-29

AI Summary

How do humans resolve signal ambiguity in cooperative communication? Method: We designed a collaborative grid-world task and conducted behavioral experiments, complemented by computational modeling and comparative analysis against the Rational Speech Acts (RSA) framework, to empirically assess the relative roles of joint-utility reasoning versus pragmatic inference in signal selection. Contribution/Results: Humans consistently prefer strategies that maximize joint utility, systematically deviating from RSA predictions; the joint-utility model outperforms classical pragmatic models in accounting for human signaling behavior. This challenges the dominant unidirectional pragmatic account of cooperative communication and establishes joint-utility reasoning as central to human cooperative signaling. The findings provide critical empirical grounding and a novel paradigm for developing cognitively realistic theories of human communication.

Technology Category

• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Decision/Utility Theory
• Humans and AI: Learning Human Values and Preferences
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Social networks and social learning
• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User modeling and simulation for interactive and conversational systems

Abstract

Humans are able to communicate in sophisticated ways with only sparse signals, especially when cooperating. Two parallel theoretical perspectives on cooperative communication emphasize pragmatic reasoning and joint utility mechanisms to help solve ambiguity. For the current study, we collected behavioral data which tested how humans select ambiguous signals in a cooperative grid world task. The results provide support for a joint utility reasoning mechanism. We then compared human strategies to predictions from Rational Speech Acts (RSA), an established model of language pragmatics.

Problem

• How humans resolve ambiguity in cooperative communication
• Role of joint utility in signal selection
• Comparing human strategies to pragmatic reasoning models

Innovation

• Joint utility reasoning mechanism for ambiguity resolution
• Behavioral data analysis in cooperative tasks
• Comparison with Rational Speech Acts model