Perspective-taking behavior as the probabilistic weighing of multiple domains
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Updated: Mar 26, 2026

A Psychophysics Paradigm for the Collection and Analysis of Similarity Judgments
Published on: March 1, 2022
Daphna Heller1, Christopher Parisien2, Suzanne Stevenson1
1University of Toronto, Canada.
Abstract:
Our starting point is the apparently-contradictory results in the psycholinguistic literature regarding whether, when interpreting a definite referring expressions, listeners process relative to the common ground from the earliest moments of processing. We propose that referring expressions are not interpreted relative solely to the common ground or solely to one's Private (or egocentric) knowledge, but rather reflect the simultaneous integration of the two perspectives. We implement this proposal in a Bayesian model of reference resolution, focusing on the model's predictions for two prior studies: Keysar, Barr, Balin, and Brauner (2000) and Heller, Grodner and Tanenhaus (2008). We test the model's predictions in a visual-world eye-tracking experiment, demonstrating that the original results cannot simply be attributed to different perspective-taking strategies, and showing how they can arise from the same perspective-taking behavior.
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