Predictive processes are crucial not only for interpreting the actions of individual agents, but also to predict how, in the context of a social interaction between two agents, the actions of one agent relate to the actions of a second agent. In the present study we investigated whether, in the context of a communicative interaction between two agents, observers can use the actions of one agent...

Communication is a process aimed at agreement on some situation definition. When the agreement is not immediate, a discussion is needed to resolve the points of disagreement using argumentation. Although such a discussion is recognized in the LAP approaches, no formal treatment of it has been given so far. In this paper, we introduce a formal model based on recent results from argumentation the...

Put in a nutshell, the following view of the nature of communicative action seems worth considering. Communication presupposes a framework of mutual knowledge (at least mutual true beliefs) and assumptions about language (or whatever representational system is used). This underlying level need not contain any knowledge or assumptions about the goals of the users of language, in particular no as...

BACKGROUND Beyond providing cues about an agent's intention, communicative actions convey information about the presence of a second agent towards whom the action is directed (second-agent information). In two psychophysical studies we investigated whether the perceptual system makes use of this information to infer the presence of a second agent when dealing with impoverished and/or noisy sens...

This study was conducted to examine interpersonal predictive coding in individuals with high-functioning autism (HFA). Healthy and HFA participants observed point-light displays of two agents (A and B) performing separate actions. In the 'communicative' condition, the action performed by agent B responded to a communicative gesture performed by agent A. In the 'individual' condition, agent A's ...

Communicative action concerns achieving and maintaining mutual understanding among all those who are involved in a coordinated (organizational) situation. Communicative action is embedded in a social context. Current approaches in the Language/Action Perspective have focused mainly on the dynamic aspect of language, that is, on (business) conversation. In this paper, we develop a new model of c...

I outline an approach to communicative action (CA). Its bases are (i) a bargaining game approach to Elementary Social Acts (ESAs) and (ii) a Decision-Theoretic Semantics (DTS) in which utility and, as a special case, evidential relevance play a central role. The act analysis is extended to a variety of act types. Examples of various kinds of`conventional' and`conversational' impli-cature illust...