Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Tracking word-object co-occurrence statistics can reduce referential uncertainty during word learning. But human learners are constrained by limits on attention and memory, and therefore must store a subset of the information available—how do they select what information to store? We hypothesize that the presence of referential cues like eye gaze guides how learners allocate their attention. In three large-scale experiments with adults, we test how the presence of referential cues affects cross-situational word learning. Referential cues shift learners away from multiple hypothesis tracking towards storing only a single hypothesis (Experiments 1 and 2). In addition, learners are sensitive to the reliability of a referential cue and when it is less reliable, they are less likely to use the cue and more likely to store multiple hypotheses (Experiment 3). Together, the data suggest a rational tradeoff: In conditions of greater uncertainty, learners tend to store a broader range of information.