Interaction Structure Constrains the Emergence of Conventions in Group Communication
By Veronica Boyce, Robert D. Hawkins, Noah D. Goodman, and Michael C. Frank
10 pagesAcross groups of different sizes and interaction constraints, describers produced increasingly efficient utterances and matchers made increasingly accurate selections. Critically, however, we found that smaller groups and groups with less-constrained interaction structures (“thick channels”) showed stronger convergence to group-specific conventions than large groups with constrained interaction structures (“thin channels”), which struggled with convention formation.