Rational Use of Time for Social Coordination in Humans and AI

arXiv:2611.14766v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: All social interactions are situated in time. Previous studies have shown that humans are able to use implicit temporal cues, such as the duration of a pause, to infer others' mental states. But how do humans use temporal cues for dynamic, fine-grained social coordination? And can AI systems do the same, without ``experiencing'' continuous real-time as humans do? We study these questions using a cooperative card game task called The Mind, which requires players to achieve a shared goal across repeated interactions but forbids explicit communication: the only available signal is the passage of time.