Bonn researchers get to the bottom of the social aspect of communication for mental activity
Across all species, important survival skills such as hunting prey are passed on from parents to offspring through communication. Researchers at the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) and the University of Bonn were able to show that effective language-like communication is a two-way process between sender and receiver. Their results have been published in the journal "Nature Communications".Communication - be it through sounds, smells or movements - is crucial for survival. Its social aspect is fundamental to cognition, as our task descriptions in the brain are shaped not only by sensory experiences, but also by the information communicated to us. "We know from our everyday lives that social communication improves our learning abilities in the real world, which is summarized by the saying ’teaching is learning for the second time’," says Tatjana Tchumatchenko from the Institute of Experimental Epileptology and Cognition Research at the UKB and member of the Transdisciplinary Research Area (TRA) "Modelling" at the University of Bonn.
In a novel study, the Bonn researchers used artificial networks as agents that took on the roles of teachers and students. The teacher network learned to solve a maze and then guided the student network through the task by transmitting a message. This setup allowed the researchers to investigate how language-like communication between artificial agents improves learning and task performance.
Brain creates abstractions for our real world
The results showed that both roles can develop a language that enables the student to learn from the teacher. Interestingly, this language was influenced by both the task at hand and the performance of the learner. "What we found is consistent with what is known about language formation in animals," says Carlos Wert-Carvajal, co-corresponding author and PhD student at the University of Bonn in Tchumatchenko’s research group at the UKB. He emphasizes that the way our brain encodes our world is not only determined by our own experiences, but also creates abstractions that are understandable to others: "For example, we don’t say ’sweet, crunchy, round red or green fruit’, but use the single word ’apple’. Such a word exists because our language has evolved to represent a shared experience that provides a pleasant reward." In other words, every language must describe the world as efficiently as possible.
This efficiency meant not only a concise message, but also one that contained as much information as possible. Good language had to combine both the teacher’s and student’s internal descriptions of the task and the actual characteristics of the real world. "When we gave feedback on how well the learner performed the task, the teacher changed his language to convey more useful information," explains first author Tobias Wieczorek, who until recently was a master’s student at the University of Bonn in the Tchumatchenko group at UKB. This process shows that effective communication is a two-way process. "Both the sender and the receiver need to work together to ensure that the information exchanged is clear, precise and truly useful," says Tchumatchenko, who led the study.
Language closes the circle in communication as a shared experience
Remarkably, by "closing the loop" - that is, by feeding the language of the learner back to itself - the Bonn researchers were able to enable learners to teach each other. Despite lacking explicit teaching skills, the agents effectively communicated essential information and demonstrated the robustness of the developed language. "Although they did not know how to ’teach’, they were still able to use their language to convey important information," says co-corresponding author Dr. Maximilian Eggl, who until recently was a postdoc at the University of Bonn in Tchumatchenko’s research group at UKB.
This research highlights the fundamental role of language-like communication as a shared cognitive experience and demonstrates its critical importance for learning and generalization. The results provide valuable insights into the design of biological and artificial communication systems that optimize learning and task performance in different environments.