Communicating Compositional Patterns

How do people perceive and communicate structure? We investigate this question by letting participants play a communication game, where one player describes a pattern, and another player redraws it based on the description alone. We use this paradigm to compare two models of pattern description, one compositional (complex structures built out of simpler ones) and one noncompositional. We find that compositional patterns are communicated more effectively than noncompositional patterns, that a compositional model of pattern description predicts which patterns are harder to describe, and that this model can be used to evaluate participants’ drawings, producing humanlike quality ratings. Our results suggest that natural language can tap into a compositionally structured pattern description language.