Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Communication is highly overloaded. Despite this, even young children are good at leveraging context to understandambiguous signals. We propose a computational shared agency account of signaling that we call the Imagined We (IW)framework. We leverage Bayesian Theory of Mind to provide mechanisms for rational action planning and inverse actioninterpretation. In order to expand this framework for communication, we first treat signals as rational actions. We thenincorporate our rich understanding of intuitive utilities to constrain the scope of affordable actions. Finally, we treatcommunication as a cooperative act, subject to constraints of maximizing a shared utility. We implement this modelin two completely different behavioral psychology works to demonstrate the generality of the IW under different typesof uncertainty in cooperative communication. Additionally, we demonstrate that the IW outperforms multiple baselinemodels in a novel task across a series of simulation conditions.