A Cognitive Account of Situated Communication

A Cognitive Account of Situated Communication Rita B. Ardito (ardito@psych.unito.it) Bruno G. Bara (bara@psych.unito.it) Enrico Blanzieri (blanzier@psych.unito.it) Centro di Scienza Cognitiva, Universita’ di Torino via Po 14, 10123 Torino, Italy Abstract Communication is situated and it is situated in the environment, in the perception the participants have of the environment, and also in the mental representations they privately retain. This work addresses the problem of explaining the interaction between state of the physical world and mental states of actors involved in a communicative exchange. We have the goal of integrating physical world representations, such as space representation, physical co- presence of the actors and physical nature of the communication channel, with a cognitive account of communicative phenomena. We introduce the concepts of scene, situation and scenery for elaborating a theory for situated communication and give an account of the interaction between mental states involved in communication and the subjective representations of the state of the world. 1. Introduction Communication and physical action are strictly connected. Since Austin’s approach to Pragmatics based on speech-acts (Austin, 1962), the things one does through (not only) words, comprehension and generation of communication have been linked to the general framework of action. Conversely, the actions performed by an actor are better understood if considered as situated (Suchman, 1987; Clancey, 1998). Situations involve the physical world as well as the social world when other actors are present. The relationship between communication and action is complex. Actions performed in the physical social world are not necessarily communicative: in fact, they can either facilitate or impair communication itself, through a modification of the situational context. On the other hand, communication between actors can modify their intentions about performing actions in the physical world. Finally, the state of the physical world influences the possibility of performing actions and communicative acts. Current theories on communication such as Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986) and Cognitive Pragmatics Theory (Airenti, Bara and Colombetti, 1993a; 1993b) deal with accurate descriptions of mental states and cognitive functions involved in communication. However, their applications to concrete situations is not straightforward because they do not give an account of how these mental states interact with the state of the physical world in order to produce the observed natural cases. In particular, Cognitive Pragmatics, developing an intuition of Wittgenstein (1953), introduces the notion of behaviour game, namely a shared plan between the actors, but it gives no accounts of how the behaviour game is played in a concrete situation. This work addresses the problem of explaining the interaction between the state of the physical world and the mental states of actors involved in a communicative exchange. We have the goal of integrating physical world representations, such as space representation, physical co- presence of the actors and physical nature of the communication channel, with a cognitive account of communicative phenomena. Our work is consistent with the perspective outlined by Clancey (1998) of shifting from an abstract and disembodied concept of cognition to a situated one. In one case, this approach amounts to exploiting the properties of abstract shared plans in communication, in order to enrich them with the features of concrete situated actions. Our proposal is based on the novel concept of scenery that we define using the notion of a shared plan, namely a behaviour game in Cognitive Pragmatics terms. For an actor, to know the shared behaviour game is crucial in order to grasp the meaning of a communicative act. The scenery relates at the representational level context and at the level of behaviour games in terms of preconditions and possible actions. The paper is organised as follows: Section 2 discusses situated communication in the framework of situated cognition, situated action and Cognitive Pragmatics Theory; Section 3 introduces the concepts of scene, situation, scenery and scenario; Section 4 proposes a cognitive account of situated communication and in the last Section we draw some conclusion. 2. Situated communication Communication is obviously situated and it is situated in the environment, in the perception the participants have of the environment, and also in the mental representations they privately entertain. The Exs. 1-10 report a short fiction story that describes a long series of interactions between Alice, a professor, and Bob, a Ph.D student who aims to meet to discuss the draft of his thesis proposal. Alice and Bob communicate in a wide range of different physical environments (roads, corridors, office, elevator, cafeteria)