Speakers account for asymmetries in visual perspective so listeners don't have to
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Debates over adults' theory of mind use have been fueled by surprising failures of visual perspective-taking in simple communicative tasks. Motivated by recent computational models of context-sensitive language use, we reconsider the evidence in light of the nuanced pragmatics of these tasks: the differential informativity expected of a speaker depending on the context. Our model predicts that cooperative speakers faced with asymmetries in visual access ought to adjust their utterances to be more informative. In Exp. 1, we explicitly manipulated the presence or absence of occlusions and found that speakers systematically produced longer, more specific referring expressions than required given their own view when they have uncertainty about what their partner is seeing. In Exp. 2, we compare the utterances used by confederates in prior work with those produced by unscripted speakers in the same task. We find that confederates are systematically less informative than expected, leading to more listener errors. In addition to demonstrating a sophisticated form of speaker perspective-taking, these results suggest a deeper pragmatic explanation for why listeners may sometimes neglect to consider visual perspective: Failures of visual perspective-taking may in fact be explained by sophisticated pragmatic expectations about communicative behavior---that is, to successful use of theory of mind.
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