RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Communicating compositional patterns
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 451161
DO 10.1101/451161
A1 Eric Schulz
A1 Francisco Quiroga
A1 Samuel J. Gershman
YR 2018
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/10/23/451161.abstract
AB How do people perceive and communicate structure? We investigate this question by letting participants play a communication game, where one player describes a pattern, and another player redraws it based on the description alone. We use this paradigm to compare two models of pattern description, one compositional (complex structures built out of simpler ones) and one non-compositional. We find that compositional patterns are communicated more effectively than non-compositional patterns, that a compositional model of pattern description predicts which patterns are harder to describe, and that this model can be used to evaluate participants’ drawings, producing human-like quality ratings. Our results suggest that natural language can tap into a compositionally structured pattern description language.