ABSTRACT
For people to communicate effectively, they must solve the mutual knowledge problem. That is, they must develop some idea of what their communication partners know and don’t know in order to formulate what they have to say to them. Speakers come to conclusions about their partners’ states of knowledge through a number of mechanisms—by listening to what they themselves have just said, by making inferences about the partners’ state of knowledge from their category membership, or by relying on direct and backchannel feedback from their partners. This chapter describes experimental research illustrating these proposition and draws implications from this research for communication technology to support cooperative work.
