common ground

working on our submission to ASIS&T is leaving me little time to write about other stuff. however, i did ‘take a break’ yesterday to find a few papers about common ground that might be helpful for designing the experiment. where ‘a few’ really means eight papers. i am trying to find different ways researchers have operationalized common ground in their experiments, and also better understand what various psychologists think the role of common ground is in determing the meaning of ambiguous words or phrases where context is important (such as irony). also, there is one paper that is about ‘egocentric bias’ in communication, or the fact that people overestimate how well others will be able to understand what they’ve said. should be interesting reading. i’ll post summaries as i read through them. there’s an interesting paper i found a few years ago called ‘unconfounding common ground’ that i plan to re-read. the author is a cognitive psychologist interested in figuring out how common ground works at the cognitive level, referring to structures and processes in the brain. he argues that most common ground research doesn’t make the distinction between some piece of information in memory that both people know separately (i.e. they both know where zingerman’s is because they live in ann arbor and have been there before) and something that is part of a ‘common ground’ representation that is built up through conversational contributions.

here are the references: