A Rate-Distortion view of human pragmatic reasoning

Understand

What computational principles underlie human pragmatic reasoning? A prominent approach to pragmatics is the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework, which formulates pragmatic reasoning as probabilistic speakers and listeners recursively reasoning about each other.

• While RSA enjoys broad empirical support, it is not yet clear whether the dynamics of such recursive reasoning may be governed by a general optimization principle.
• Here, we present a novel analysis of the RSA framework that addresses this question.
• First, we show that RSA recursion implements an alternating maximization for optimizing a tradeoff between expected utility and communicative effort.