As with many other core human abilities, intentional communication appears a fairly straightforward phenomenon, at least until we interact with other humans having communication deficits, or until we try to build artificial cognitive agents that can effectively deal with the pervasive ambiguity of human communicative signals. It has often been assumed that these communicative abilities ultimately rely on coding-decoding of symbols whose meaning is already shared across communicators, neglecting that using those symbols requires a computational mechanism powerful enough to mutually negotiate them.
In this talk I will elaborate on the neural mechanisms supporting the human ability to rapidly generate and understand novel shared symbols. I will describe empirical evidence suggesting that the selection of communicative actions is independent from the operations of the language system, strongly dependent on dynamically updating shared conceptualizations of a signal’s use, and supported by a computational overlap between selection and recognition of a communicative behavior in communicators and addressees,