{
  "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.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": null,
  "author_total": 1,
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "Zachary P Rosen"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/2p529hr0ewkjw.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.31234/osf.io/zacnu_v7",
  "fulltext_url": null,
  "id": "2p529hr0ewkjw",
  "issns": [],
  "landing_url": "https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/zacnu_v7/",
  "language": null,
  "licence": "CC-BY-4.0",
  "licence_label": "CC BY 4.0",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": null,
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "bepress",
      "Computational Linguistics"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Computational Modeling"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Environmental Psychology"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Informational Environments"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Linguistics"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Quantitative Methods"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Social Cognition"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Social and Behavioral Sciences"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Social and Personality Psychology"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Statistical Methods"
    ],
    [
      "openalex",
      "1203|Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7223551698",
  "pdf_url": "https://osf.io/zacnu/download",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-10-20",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/2p529hr0ewkjw.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T12:19:20Z",
      "native_id": "zacnu",
      "source": "osf",
      "url": "https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/zacnu_v8/"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "mathematics",
      "origin": "bepress:Statistical Methods",
      "subfield": "statistics"
    }
  ],
  "title": "A set of dynamical rules for conversational progression act as a precursor to collective cognition",
  "title_text": "A set of dynamical rules for conversational progression act as a precursor to collective cognition",
  "type": "preprint",
  "updated_at": "2026-11-05T12:21:13Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/2p529hr0ewkjw",
  "venue": "PsyArXiv",
  "versions": []
}