Project Grant 2217478

This Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, under the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences federal grant program (CFDA 47.075), provides $763,822 to Vanderbilt University to advance understanding of cognitive and linguistic processes in conversational interactions. Over three years, the university will conduct twelve behavioral experiments to determine how individuals form probabilistic representations of what their conversational partners may know compared to themselves. The experiments aim to provide insights into how these representations are used during conversations and how they influence memory recall. Broader impacts include research training for graduate and undergraduate students, including participation from local and nationally recruited high school students from underrepresented groups. De-identified data and code will be publicly available along with study pre-registrations. Findings seek to advance dialog system design and pedagogical research insights.