A set of dynamical rules for conversational progression act as a precursor to collective cognition
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.
Related
- Whole-brain modeling of dynamic causal circuits in human cognition using amortized variational inference
- Maximum Entropy Probability Distributions on Spheres with Fixed Mean Busemann Function and Holomorphic-Information-Geometric Model of Cognition
- Was the Pre-Event SWIR Anomaly at Tsangbu Ri a Genuine Glacier-Collapse Precursor? A Calibrated Multi-Glacier Test of the 2026 Case
- HDTR-KT: Mutually Regulated Knowledge Tracing with Hierarchical Local Evolution and Dual-Timescale Global Cognition
- SURVEY BEHAVIOR AND COGNITION ACROSS THE LIFE COURSE: EVIDENCE FROM THE PANEL STUDY OF INCOME DYNAMICS.
BibTeX
@misc{rosen2026dynamical,
title = {{A set of dynamical rules for conversational progression act as a precursor to collective cognition}},
author = {Zachary P Rosen},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/zacnu_v7},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/zacnu_v7/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - A set of dynamical rules for conversational progression act as a precursor to collective cognition
AU - Zachary P Rosen
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/20
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/zacnu_v7
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/zacnu_v7/
AB - 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.
ER -