Conceptual Alignment: How Brains Achieve Mutual Understanding. Issue 3 (March 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Stolk, Arjen; Verhagen, Lennart; Toni, Ivan
• Is Part Of: Trends in cognitive sciences. Volume 20:Issue 3(2016)
• Page Start: 180
• Page End: 191
• Publication Date: 2016-03
• Subjects: Cognitive science -- Periodicals; Cognitive neuroscience -- Periodicals; 153.05
• DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2015.11.007
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1364-6613

Abstract

Abstract : We share our thoughts with other minds, but we do not understand how. Having a common language certainly helps, but infants' and tourists' communicative success clearly illustrates that sharing thoughts does not require signals with a pre-assigned meaning. In fact, human communicators jointly build a fleeting conceptual space in which signals are a means to seek and provide evidence for mutual understanding. Recent work has started to capture the neural mechanisms supporting those fleeting conceptual alignments. The evidence suggests that communicators and addressees achieve mutual understanding by using the same computational procedures, implemented in the same neuronal substrate, and operating over temporal scales independent from the signals' occurrences. Trends: State-of-the-art artificial agents such as the virtual assistants on our phones are powered by associative deep-learning algorithms. Yet those agents often make communicative errors that, if made by real people, would lead us to question their mental capacities. We argue that these communicative errors are a consequence of focusing on the statistics of the signals we use to understand each other during communicative interactions. Recent empirical work aimed at understanding our communicative abilities is showing that human communicators share concepts, not signals. The evidence shows that communicators and addressees achieve mutual understanding by using the same computational procedures, implemented in the same neuronal substrate, and operating over temporal scales independent from the signals' occurrences.