This project addresses the question to what extent children, adolescents, and adults (of different cultures) can be influenced by context changes, that is, how sensitive they are to context and to what extent this context sensitivity influences the understanding of indirect communication.
Since we have already found connections between context sensitivity and communication comprehension in young children in the RIcult project, in this project we are exploring how context sensitivity changes over the course of development. For this purpose, children, adolescents, and young adults are shown vignettes describing a brief communication situation folowed by an indirect utterance (i.e., in which the protagonist does not directly say what he or she means, but only implicitly hints at it). Subjects are then asked to indicate their understanding of this utterance in an object choice task or via a Likert scale. We measure context sensitivity with different tasks that capture visual illusions (Ebbinghaus illusion) or social-emotional context changes.