In psychology, we tend to follow the general logic of fal-sificationism: we separate the ‘context of discovery’ (howwe come up with theories) from the ‘context of justification’(how we test them). However, when studying human interac-tion, separating these contexts can lead to theories with lowecological validity that do not generalize well to life outsidethe lab. We propose borrowing research practices from for-mal inductive methodologies during the process of discover-ing new regularities and analyzing natural data without beingled by theory. From the perspective of experimental psychol-ogy, this approach may appear similar to the ‘questionable re-search practice’ of HARKing (Hypothesizing After The Re-sults are Known). We argue that a carefully constructed formof HARKing can be used systematically and transparently dur-ing exploratory research and can lead to more robust and eco-logically valid theories.

The ability to create and understand novel communicative signals is exemplary of people’s creative and inferential abilities. For example, when traveling and unable to speak the local language, we can make ourselves understood by creating novel gestures. This ability is a form of abductive inference, and requires people to generate novel hypotheses about possible meanings of signals (abduction proper). We propose that novel hypotheses may be generated from scratch by re-conceptualizing perceptual and conceptual representations through analogical augmentation. We plan to use robotics methodology to assess the plausibility of this model. By enhancing a robot with analogical augmentation we aim to enable it to generate novel gestures based on analogies. This lays the groundwork for more natural human-robot interaction. Furthermore, by studying the robot’s gestures and to what extent people can understand them, we gain better understanding of the abduction-based computational processes underlying communication.