Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Humans primarily communicate through words and gestures. In some cases, however, humans also communicate indirectlythrough objects, such as trafc cones or stanchion ropes. How does the human mind generate and interpret the socialmeaning of objects? Here we show that a computational model that uses commonsense physics and Theory of Mindspontaneously gives rise to the ability to communicate through objects. As predicted by our model, we show that peoplecan infer the communicative meaning of novel objects by reasoning about the costs they impose, even in the absence ofa pre-existing convention. Moreover, we show that people store the meaning of an object after a single exposure andrecognize it in subsequent encounters. Our model sheds light on how humans bootstrap cognitive capacities that we sharewith other animals to give rise to uniquely-human cognition.