A set of dynamical rules for conversational progression act as a precursor to collective cognition
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Conversation unfolds between speakers as a series of coordinated updates from prior ideas expressed in earlier utterances to new sets of ideas. This process of speakers and conversation partners jointly updating prior "conversation states" is an important piece of the cognitive scaffolding that enables social coordination, and even collective cognition -- the capacity for individuals to pool their cognitive resources to solve problems together. However, a functional data-driven description of how this process works is missing in the extant literature. This report provides a functional description of how conversation states are updated in terms of information-theoretic processes, while analyzing a corpus of 5,447 conversations in nine typologically diverse languages. Our results show that individuals form a strongly connected distributed computational system during conversation, which generates new information according to a power-law distribution. This enables speakers to encode and solve a potentially unbounded number of problems and ideas, simply by conversing.
Source: PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints)
Authors: Zachary P Rosen, Rick Dale
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7223061388