Table 1.
Overview of the different measures of association strength as conditional probabilities between targets, clues and guesses.
Forward association strength for the director for example denotes the conditional probability of the clue word given the target word. This operationalizes egocentric salience because it concerns the first words that come to mind when the director sees the target word, if the director does not take into account that they have to select a clue word that is useful for the matcher. Forward association strength therefore operationalizes egocentric salience while backward association strength operationalizes allocentric salience.
Fig 1.
Schematic representation of how our measures of association strength played out in the experiments.
In Panel A, the director is given the target word ‘bird’ and chooses the clue word based on highest forward association strength, in this case ‘fly’. The matcher also uses forward association strength to make their guess and guesses the highest ranked term ‘plane’. If the matcher had been using backward association strength to make their guess, they would have said ‘swatter’ (because ‘swatter’ is the most likely target word to have elicited the clue word ‘fly’). In Panel B, the director chooses their clue word based on the highest backward association strength which leads the matcher to correctly guess ‘bird’. If the matcher attempts to use backward association strength to infer what prompted the director to say ‘chirp’, they incorrectly guess ‘cricket’.
Fig 2.
(A) a successful director trial: the director provides the clue ‘car’ for the target ‘vehicle’, and the matcher successfully guesses ‘vehicle’. (B) an unsuccessful matcher trial: the matcher guesses ‘strategy’ from the clue ‘plan’, but the target was actually ‘treatment’.
Fig 3.
Success (A) and director backward association strength (B) over rounds. The black lines indicate averages across dyads with error bars showing bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals. Colored lines represent individual dyads. Note the different scales in A and B.
Table 2.
Means and standard deviations (in parentheses) of success, RT (reaction time in seconds), director backward association strength (BAS), director forward association strength (FAS), matcher backward association strength (BAS), matcher forward association strength (FAS), clue rank, guess rank, and optimal:given (OG) ratio.
Fig 4.
Success in the word guessing game by symmetry of the target word.
The black lines indicate average across dyads with error bars showing bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals. Colored lines represent individual dyads. The curious pattern for Top 1 symmetric items in round six appears to be an artefact of the few observations (N = 37) in that data cell.
Fig 5.
Success in the word guessing game by accessibility of the target word.
The black lines indicate average across dyads with error bars showing bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals. Colored lines represent individual dyads.
Fig 6.
Reaction time (A), ratio between optimal clue and the clue given (B), guess rank (C), clue rank (D), director forward association strength (E), matcher backward association strength (F), and matcher forward association strength (G) across rounds. The black lines indicate average across dyads with error bars showing bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals. Colored lines represent individual dyads. Note the different scales.
Table 3.
Statistical models summary table (Experiment 1).
Fig 7.
An example of the feedback screen after an incorrect trial in Experiment 2.
Fig 8.
Success (A) and director backward association strength (B) over rounds. The black lines indicate averages across dyads with error bars showing bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals. Colored lines represent individual dyads. Note the different scales in A and B.
Table 4.
Means and standard deviations of success, RT (reaction time in seconds), director backward association strength (BAS), director forward association strength (FAS), matcher backward association strength (BAS), matcher forward association strength (FAS), clue rank, guess rank, and optimal:given (OG) ratio.
Fig 9.
Success in the word guessing game by accessibility of the target word over rounds.
The black lines indicate average across dyads with error bars showing bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals. Colored lines represent individual dyads.
Fig 10.
Reaction time (A), ratio between optimal clue and the clue given (B), guess rank (C), clue rank (D), director forward association strength (E), matcher backward association strength (F), and matcher forward association strength (G) across rounds. The black lines indicate average across dyads with error bars showing bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals. Colored lines represent individual dyads. Note the different scales.
Table 5.
Statistical models summary table (Experiment 2).
Fig 11.
An illustration of Zipf value (clue word frequency) over rounds in Experiment 1 (left) and Experiment 2 (right).
Fig 12.
Success (A) and director backward association strength (B) over rounds. The black lines indicate averages across dyads with error bars showing bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals. Colored lines represent individual dyads. Note the different scales in A and B.
Table 6.
Means and standard deviations of success, RT (reaction time in seconds), director backward association strength (BAS), director forward association strength (FAS), matcher backward association strength (BAS), matcher forward association strength (FAS), clue rank, guess rank, optimal:given (OG) ratio, and Zipf value across rounds.
Fig 13.
Success in the word guessing game by symmetry of the target word.
The black lines indicate average across dyads with error bars showing bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals. Colored lines represent individual dyads.
Fig 14.
Success in the word guessing game by accessibility of the target word.
The black lines indicate average across dyads with error bars showing bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals. Colored lines represent individual dyads.
Fig 15.
Reaction time (A), ratio between optimal clue and the clue given (B), clue Zipf value (C), guess rank (D), clue rank (E), director forward association strength (F), matcher backward association strength (G), and matcher forward association strength (H) across rounds. The black lines indicate average across dyads with error bars showing bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals. Colored lines represent individual dyads. Note the different scales.
Table 7.
Statistical models summary table (Experiment 3).