Tracking minds in communication
Past research suggesting that social cognition and language have limited interaction has focused on complex mental state inferences, often derived from complete utterances.
Analyzing how people produce and process language at the word level, in real time, reveals rich social microprocesses that permeate linguistic communication.
These social inferences often reflect representations of other people’s cognitive processes (such as their memory and attention) rather than only classic notions of mental state attribution, such as beliefs and desires.
These new findings suggest that social cognition and language might have deep, pervasive, and real-time interactions that make linguistic communication possible.
Based on this, we propose a framework where the construction and interpretation of utterances at the word level is supported by social micro-processes that instantiate dynamic representations of other minds.
https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(24)00312-7
