There is substantial variability in the expectations that communication partners bring into interactions, creating the potential for misunderstandings. To directly probe these gaps and our ability to overcome them, we propose a communication task based on color-concept associations. In Experiment 1, we establish several key properties of the mental representations of these expectations, or \emph{lexical priors}, based on recent probabilistic theories. Associations are more variable for abstract concepts, variability is represented as uncertainty within each individual, and uncertainty enables accurate predictions about whether others are likely to share the same association. In Experiment 2, we then examine the downstream consequences of these representations for communication. Accuracy is initially low when communicating about concepts with more variable associations, but rapidly increases as participants form ad hoc conventions. Together, our findings suggest that people cope with variability by maintaining well-calibrated uncertainty about their partner and appropriately adaptable representations of their own.

翻译：通信伙伴带来互动的预期差异很大, 从而产生误解的可能性。 为了直接探究这些差距和我们克服这些差距的能力, 我们提议了基于肤色观念协会的沟通任务。 在实验1中, 我们根据最近的概率理论, 确定了这些期望心理表现的若干关键属性, 即 /emph{lexical passions} 。 协会对于抽象概念来说比较不同, 差异在每个人内部代表着不确定性, 不确定性使得可以准确预测其他人是否可能拥有相同的联系。 在实验2中, 我们随后研究了这些表达方式的下游影响。 当与更多变异协会交流概念时, 准确性最初很低, 但随着参与者组成临时公约而迅速增加。 我们的研究结果共同表明,人们通过保持对伴侣的高度不确定性和适当的适应性表现来应对变异性。