Robert Hawkins

All Publications

• Parents spontaneously scaffold the formation of conversational pacts with their children CHILD DEVELOPMENT Leung, A., Yurovsky, D., Hawkins, R. D. 2024

  Abstract

  Adults readily coordinate on temporary pacts about how to refer to things in conversation. Young children are also capable of forming pacts with peers given appropriate experimenter intervention. Here, we investigate whether parents may spontaneously provide a similar kind of scaffolding with U.S. children in a director-matcher task (N = 201, 49% female; ages 4, 6, 8). In Experiment 1, we show that parents initiate more clarification exchanges with younger children who, in turn, are more likely to adopt labels introduced by the parent. We then examine whether the benefit of such scaffolding acts primarily through childrens' difficulties with comprehension (Experiment 2) or production (Experiment 3). Our findings suggest that parents primarily scaffold pacts by easing children's production difficulties, modeling cooperative communication.

  View details for DOI 10.1111/cdev.14186

  View details for Web of Science ID 001356899200001

  View details for PubMedID 39552570

• Interaction structure constrains the emergence of conventions in group communication. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America Boyce, V., Hawkins, R. D., Goodman, N. D., Frank, M. C. 2024; 121 (28): e2403888121

  Abstract

  Real-world communication frequently requires language producers to address more than one comprehender at once, yet most psycholinguistic research focuses on one-on-one communication. As the audience size grows, interlocutors face new challenges that do not arise in dyads. They must consider multiple perspectives and weigh multiple sources of feedback to build shared understanding. Here, we ask which properties of the group's interaction structure facilitate successful communication. We used a repeated reference game paradigm in which directors instructed between one and five matchers to choose specific targets out of a set of abstract figures. Across 313 games (N = 1,319 participants), we manipulated several key constraints on the group's interaction, including the amount of feedback that matchers could give to directors and the availability of peer interaction between matchers. Across groups of different sizes and interaction constraints, describers produced increasingly efficient utterances and matchers made increasingly accurate selections. Critically, however, we found that smaller groups and groups with less-constrained interaction structures ("thick channels") showed stronger convergence to group-specific conventions than large groups with constrained interaction structures ("thin channels"), which struggled with convention formation. Overall, these results shed light on the core structural factors that enable communication to thrive in larger groups.

  View details for DOI 10.1073/pnas.2403888121

  View details for PubMedID 38968102

• A Hierarchical Bayesian Model of Adaptive Teaching COGNITIVE SCIENCE Chen, A. M., Palacci, A., Velez, N., Hawkins, R. D., Gershman, S. J. 2024; 48 (7): e13477

  Abstract

  How do teachers learn about what learners already know? How do learners aid teachers by providing them with information about their background knowledge and what they find confusing? We formalize this collaborative reasoning process using a hierarchical Bayesian model of pedagogy. We then evaluate this model in two online behavioral experiments (N = 312 adults). In Experiment 1, we show that teachers select examples that account for learners' background knowledge, and adjust their examples based on learners' feedback. In Experiment 2, we show that learners strategically provide more feedback when teachers' examples deviate from their background knowledge. These findings provide a foundation for extending computational accounts of pedagogy to richer interactive settings.

  View details for DOI 10.1111/cogs.13477

  View details for Web of Science ID 001268089700001

  View details for PubMedID 38980989

• Group Coordination Catalyzes Individual and Cultural Intelligence. Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science Wu, C. M., Dale, R., Hawkins, R. D. 2024; 8: 1037-1057

  Abstract

  A large program of research has aimed to ground large-scale cultural phenomena in processes taking place within individual minds. For example, investigating whether individual agents equipped with the right social learning strategies can enable cumulative cultural evolution given long enough time horizons. However, this approach often omits the critical group-level processes that mediate between individual agents and multi-generational societies. Here, we argue that interacting groups are a necessary and explanatory level of analysis, linking individual and collective intelligence through two characteristic feedback loops. In the first loop, more sophisticated individual-level social learning mechanisms based on Theory of Mind facilitate group-level complementarity, allowing distributed knowledge to be compositionally recombined in groups; these group-level innovations, in turn, ease the cognitive load on individuals. In the second loop, societal-level processes of cumulative culture provide groups with new cognitive technologies, including shared language and conceptual abstractions, which set in motion new group-level processes to further coordinate, recombine, and innovate. Taken together, these cycles establish group-level interaction as a dual engine of intelligence, catalyzing both individual cognition and cumulative culture.

  View details for DOI 10.1162/opmi_a_00155

  View details for PubMedID 39229610

• Flexible social inference facilitates targeted social learning when rewards are not observable. Nature human behaviour Hawkins, R. D., Berdahl, A. M., Pentland, A. '., Tenenbaum, J. B., Goodman, N. D., Krafft, P. M. 2023

  Abstract

  Groups coordinate more effectively when individuals are able to learn from others' successes. But acquiring such knowledge is not always easy, especially in real-world environments where success is hidden from public view. We suggest that social inference capacities may help bridge this gap, allowing individuals to update their beliefs about others' underlying knowledge and success from observable trajectories of behaviour. We compared our social inference model against simpler heuristics in three studies of human behaviour in a collective-sensing task. Experiment 1 demonstrated that average performance improved as a function of group size at a rate greater than predicted by heuristic models. Experiment 2 introduced artificial agents to evaluate how individuals selectively rely on social information. Experiment 3 generalized these findings to a more complex reward landscape. Taken together, our findings provide insight into the relationship between individual social cognition and the flexibility of collective behaviour.

  View details for DOI 10.1038/s41562-023-01682-x

  View details for PubMedID 37591983

• The Emergence of Specialized Roles Within Groups TOPICS IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE Goldstone, R. L., Andrade-Lotero, E. J., Hawkins, R. D., Roberts, M. E. 2024; 16 (2): 257-281

  Abstract

  Humans routinely form groups to achieve goals that no individual can accomplish alone. Group coordination often brings to mind synchrony and alignment, where all individuals do the same thing (e.g., driving on the right side of the road, marching in lockstep, or playing musical instruments on a regular beat). Yet, effective coordination also typically involves differentiation, where specialized roles emerge for different members (e.g., prep stations in a kitchen or positions on an athletic team). Role specialization poses a challenge for computational models of group coordination, which have largely focused on achieving synchrony. Here, we present the CARMI framework, which characterizes role specialization processes in terms of five core features that we hope will help guide future model development: Communication, Adaptation to feedback, Repulsion, Multi-level planning, and Intention modeling. Although there are many paths to role formation, we suggest that roles emerge when each agent in a group dynamically allocates their behavior toward a shared goal to complement what they expect others to do. In other words, coordination concerns beliefs (who will do what) rather than simple actions. We describe three related experimental paradigms-"Group Binary Search," "Battles of the Exes," and "Find the Unicorn"-that we have used to study differentiation processes in the lab, each emphasizing different aspects of the CARMI framework.

  View details for DOI 10.1111/tops.12644

  View details for Web of Science ID 000939442800001

  View details for PubMedID 36843212

• Show or tell? Exploring when (and why) teaching with language outperforms demonstration COGNITION Sumers, T. R., Ho, M. K., Hawkins, R. D., Griffiths, T. L. 2023; 232: 105326

  Abstract

  People use a wide range of communicative acts across different modalities, from concrete demonstrations to abstract language. While these modalities are typically studied independently, we take a comparative approach and ask when and why one modality might outperform another. We present a series of real-time, multi-player experiments asking participants to teach concepts using either demonstrations or language. Our first experiment (N=416) asks when language might outperform demonstration. We manipulate the complexity of the concept being taught and find that language communicates complex concepts more effectively than demonstration. We then ask why language succeeds in this setting. We hypothesized that language allowed teachers to reference abstract object features (e.g., shapes and colors), while demonstration teachers could only provide concrete examples (specific positive or negative objects). To test this hypothesis, our second experiment (N=568) ablated object features from the teacher's interface. This manipulation severely impaired linguistic (but not demonstrative) teaching. Our findings suggest that language communicates complex concepts by directly transmitting abstract rules. In contrast, demonstrations transmit examples, requiring the learner to infer the rules.

  View details for DOI 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105326

  View details for Web of Science ID 000899480800005

  View details for PubMedID 36473238

• Shades of confusion: Lexical uncertainty modulates ad hoc coordination in an interactive communication task COGNITION Murthy, S. K., Griffiths, T. L., Hawkins, R. D. 2022; 225: 105152

  Abstract

  There is substantial variability in the expectations that communication partners bring into interactions, creating the potential for misunderstandings. To directly probe these gaps and our ability to overcome them, we propose a communication task based on color-concept associations. In Experiment 1, we establish several key properties of the mental representations of these expectations, or lexical priors, based on recent probabilistic theories. Associations are more variable for abstract concepts, variability is represented as uncertainty within each individual, and uncertainty enables accurate predictions about whether others are likely to share the same association. In Experiment 2, we then examine the downstream consequences of these representations for communication. Accuracy is initially low when communicating about concepts with more variable associations, but rapidly increases as participants form ad hoc conventions. Together, our findings suggest that people cope with variability by maintaining well-calibrated uncertainty about their partner and appropriately adaptable representations of their own.

  View details for DOI 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105152

  View details for Web of Science ID 000831313700006

  View details for PubMedID 35605388

• A Pragmatic Account of the Weak Evidence Effect. Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science Barnett, S. A., Griffiths, T. L., Hawkins, R. D. 2022; 6: 169-182

  Abstract

  Language is not only used to transmit neutral information; we often seek to persuade by arguing in favor of a particular view. Persuasion raises a number of challenges for classical accounts of belief updating, as information cannot be taken at face value. How should listeners account for a speaker's "hidden agenda" when incorporating new information? Here, we extend recent probabilistic models of recursive social reasoning to allow for persuasive goals and show that our model provides a pragmatic account for why weakly favorable arguments may backfire, a phenomenon known as the weak evidence effect. Critically, this model predicts a systematic relationship between belief updates and expectations about the information source: weak evidence should only backfire when speakers are expected to act under persuasive goals and prefer the strongest evidence. We introduce a simple experimental paradigm called the Stick Contest to measure the extent to which the weak evidence effect depends on speaker expectations, and show that a pragmatic listener model accounts for the empirical data better than alternative models. Our findings suggest further avenues for rational models of social reasoning to illuminate classical decision-making phenomena.

  View details for DOI 10.1162/opmi_a_00061

  View details for PubMedID 36439072

• Probing BERT's priors with serial reproduction chains Yamakoshi, T., Griffiths, T. L., Hawkins, R. D., Assoc Computa Linguist ASSOC COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS-ACL. 2022: 3977-3992

  View details for Web of Science ID 000828767404007

• Learning Rewards from Linguistic Feedback Sumers, T. R., Ho, M. K., Hawkins, R. D., Narasimhan, K., Griffiths, T. L., Assoc Advancement Artificial Intelligence ASSOC ADVANCEMENT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. 2021: 6002-6010

  View details for Web of Science ID 000680423506013

• Investigating representations of verb bias in neural language models Hawkins, R. D., Yamakoshi, T., Griffiths, T. L., Goldberg, A. E., Assoc Computat Linguist ASSOC COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS-ACL. 2020: 4653-4663

  View details for Web of Science ID 000855160704064

• The Emergence of Social Norms and Conventions. Trends in cognitive sciences Hawkins, R. X., Goodman, N. D., Goldstone, R. L. 2018

  Abstract

  The utility of our actions frequently depends upon the beliefs and behavior of other agents. Thankfully, through experience, we learn norms and conventions that provide stable expectations for navigating our social world. Here, we review several distinct influences on their content and distribution. At the level of individuals locally interacting in dyads, success depends on rapidly adapting pre-existing norms to the local context. Hence, norms are shaped by complex cognitive processes involved in learning and social reasoning. At the population level, norms are influenced by intergenerational transmission and the structure of the social network. As human social connectivity continues to increase, understanding and predicting how these levels and time scales interact to produce new norms will be crucial for improving communities.

  View details for PubMedID 30522867

• Improving the Replicability of Psychological Science Through Pedagogy Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science. Hawkins, R. D., Smith, E. N., Au, C., Arias, J. M., Catapano, R., Hermann, E., Keil, M., Lampinen, A., Raposo, S., Reynolds, J., Salehi, S., Salloum, J., Tan, J., Frank, M. C. 2018; 1 (1): 7-18

  View details for DOI 10.1177/2515245917740427

• Path ensembles and a tradeoff between communication efficiency and resilience in the human connectome BRAIN STRUCTURE & FUNCTION Avena-Koenigsberger, A., Misic, B., Hawkins, R. X., Griffa, A., Hagmann, P., Goni, J., Sporns, O. 2017; 222 (1): 603-618

  Abstract

  Computational analysis of communication efficiency of brain networks often relies on graph-theoretic measures based on the shortest paths between network nodes. Here, we explore a communication scheme that relaxes the assumption that information travels exclusively through optimally short paths. The scheme assumes that communication between a pair of brain regions may take place through a path ensemble comprising the k-shortest paths between those regions. To explore this approach, we map path ensembles in a set of anatomical brain networks derived from diffusion imaging and tractography. We show that while considering optimally short paths excludes a significant fraction of network connections from participating in communication, considering k-shortest path ensembles allows all connections in the network to contribute. Path ensembles enable us to assess the resilience of communication pathways between brain regions, by measuring the number of alternative, disjoint paths within the ensemble, and to compare generalized measures of path length and betweenness centrality to those that result when considering only the single shortest path between node pairs. Furthermore, we find a significant correlation, indicative of a trade-off, between communication efficiency and resilience of communication pathways in structural brain networks. Finally, we use k-shortest path ensembles to demonstrate hemispherical lateralization of efficiency and resilience.

  View details for DOI 10.1007/s00429-016-1238-5

  View details for Web of Science ID 000392292100035

  View details for PubMedID 27334341

• Can two dots form a Gestalt? Measuring emergent features with the capacity coefficient. Vision research Hawkins, R. X., Houpt, J. W., Eidels, A., Townsend, J. T. 2016; 126: 19-33

  Abstract

  While there is widespread agreement among vision researchers on the importance of some local aspects of visual stimuli, such as hue and intensity, there is no general consensus on a full set of basic sources of information used in perceptual tasks or how they are processed. Gestalt theories place particular value on emergent features, which are based on the higher-order relationships among elements of a stimulus rather than local properties. Thus, arbitrating between different accounts of features is an important step in arbitrating between local and Gestalt theories of perception in general. In this paper, we present the capacity coefficient from Systems Factorial Technology (SFT) as a quantitative approach for formalizing and rigorously testing predictions made by local and Gestalt theories of features. As a simple, easily controlled domain for testing this approach, we focus on the local feature of location and the emergent features of Orientation and Proximity in a pair of dots. We introduce a redundant-target change detection task to compare our capacity measure on (1) trials where the configuration of the dots changed along with their location against (2) trials where the amount of local location change was exactly the same, but there was no change in the configuration. Our results, in conjunction with our modeling tools, favor the Gestalt account of emergent features. We conclude by suggesting several candidate information-processing models that incorporate emergent features, which follow from our approach.

  View details for DOI 10.1016/j.visres.2015.04.019

  View details for PubMedID 25986994

• A tutorial on General Recognition Theory JOURNAL OF MATHEMATICAL PSYCHOLOGY Silbert, N. H., Hawkins, R. X. 2016; 73: 94-109

  View details for DOI 10.1016/j.jmp.2016.04.011

  View details for Web of Science ID 000381067200007

• The Formation of Social Conventions in Real-Time Environments PLOS ONE Hawkins, R. X., Goldstone, R. L. 2016; 11 (3)

  Abstract

  Why are some behaviors governed by strong social conventions while others are not? We experimentally investigate two factors contributing to the formation of conventions in a game of impure coordination: the continuity of interaction within each round of play (simultaneous vs. real-time) and the stakes of the interaction (high vs. low differences between payoffs). To maximize efficiency and fairness in this game, players must coordinate on one of two equally advantageous equilibria. In agreement with other studies manipulating continuity of interaction, we find that players who were allowed to interact continuously within rounds achieved outcomes with greater efficiency and fairness than players who were forced to make simultaneous decisions. However, the stability of equilibria in the real-time condition varied systematically and dramatically with stakes: players converged on more stable patterns of behavior when stakes are high. To account for this result, we present a novel analysis of the dynamics of continuous interaction and signaling within rounds. We discuss this previously unconsidered interaction between within-trial and across-trial dynamics as a form of social canalization. When stakes are low in a real-time environment, players can satisfactorily coordinate 'on the fly', but when stakes are high there is increased pressure to establish and adhere to shared expectations that persist across rounds.

  View details for DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0151670

  View details for Web of Science ID 000372697400036

  View details for PubMedCentralID PMC4803472

• The Formation of Social Conventions in Real-Time Environments. PloS one Hawkins, R. X., Goldstone, R. L. 2016; 11 (3): e0151670

  Abstract

  Why are some behaviors governed by strong social conventions while others are not? We experimentally investigate two factors contributing to the formation of conventions in a game of impure coordination: the continuity of interaction within each round of play (simultaneous vs. real-time) and the stakes of the interaction (high vs. low differences between payoffs). To maximize efficiency and fairness in this game, players must coordinate on one of two equally advantageous equilibria. In agreement with other studies manipulating continuity of interaction, we find that players who were allowed to interact continuously within rounds achieved outcomes with greater efficiency and fairness than players who were forced to make simultaneous decisions. However, the stability of equilibria in the real-time condition varied systematically and dramatically with stakes: players converged on more stable patterns of behavior when stakes are high. To account for this result, we present a novel analysis of the dynamics of continuous interaction and signaling within rounds. We discuss this previously unconsidered interaction between within-trial and across-trial dynamics as a form of social canalization. When stakes are low in a real-time environment, players can satisfactorily coordinate 'on the fly', but when stakes are high there is increased pressure to establish and adhere to shared expectations that persist across rounds.

  View details for DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0151670

  View details for PubMedID 27002729

  View details for PubMedCentralID PMC4803472

• Conducting real-time multiplayer experiments on the web BEHAVIOR RESEARCH METHODS Hawkins, R. X. 2015; 47 (4): 966-976

  Abstract

  Group behavior experiments require potentially large numbers of participants to interact in real time with perfect information about one another. In this paper, we address the methodological challenge of developing and conducting such experiments on the web, thereby broadening access to online labor markets as well as allowing for participation through mobile devices. In particular, we combine a set of recent web development technologies, including Node.js with the Socket.io module, HTML5 canvas, and jQuery, to provide a secure platform for pedagogical demonstrations and scalable, unsupervised experiment administration. Template code is provided for an example real-time behavioral game theory experiment which automatically pairs participants into dyads and places them into a virtual world. In total, this treatment is intended to allow those with a background in non-web-based programming to modify the template, which handles the technical server-client networking details, for their own experiments.

  View details for DOI 10.3758/s13428-014-0515-6

  View details for Web of Science ID 000364511400005

  View details for PubMedID 25271089

• Bootstrap Methods for the Empirical Study of Decision-Making and Information Flows in Social Systems ENTROPY DeDeo, S., Hawkins, R. X., Klingenstein, S., Hitchcock, T. 2013; 15 (6): 2246-2276

  View details for DOI 10.3390/e15062246

  View details for Web of Science ID 000320773000014