The Impact of Pressure to Communicate on Abstract and Compositional Thinking

Humans display phenomenal abstract and compositional thinking. We can conceptually place the same object at multiple levels of abstraction ignoring different irrelevant information based on the context. We can also compose different concepts to produce novel concepts and experiences that can sometimes be only imagined and are not even part of the real world. In this work, we study the impact of pressure to communicate on abstract and compositional thinking. By instructing one group to write down their strategy while asking the other group to just focus on an abstract goal, we aim to show that the group that was pressured to communicate is better at forming abstract sub-goals, and composing these sub-goals to solve a set of computer games.