On December 9th my group will host a talk from Paula Rubio Fernandez (https://www.mpi.nl/people/rubio-fernandez-paula). Paula has in recent years done important work on the relationship between pragmatics and theory of mind, on cross cultural differences in the organisation of intersubjective space, and on the collaborative foundations of reference.

Her talk will take place at 4pm on December 9th in Lib2 in the library. It's a large room and the talk is out of term time, so please feel free to share details of the talk with anyone who might be interested.
All are welcome. Title and abstract are below.
All the best;

Richard

The Cognitive Trinity of Common Ground

Paula Rubio-Fernandez

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 how CG works, or even what exactly it is. In this talk I will introduce a new research program that is essential to understanding CG: I propose to study CG as a product of cultural evolution. This approach requires identifying (i) those cognitive capacities that are required for the emergence of CG in human cognition, and (ii) how those capacities interact in (a) the development of CG through children’s social learning across cultures; (b) its formation through social interaction across the lifespan, and (c) its management in conversation across languages. I hypothesize that forming and using CG is a complex human ability that emerges from the interaction of three cognitive capacities — joint attention, shared memory, and the use of reference systems — under a rationality principle. This is what I informally call the Cognitive Trinity of Common Ground, which could also be described as a naïve model of rational memory.