Modeling Social Learning and Culture

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Hoppitt ◽  
Kevin N. Laland
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Model Building ◽  
Biological Evolution ◽  
Reaction Diffusion ◽  
Agent Based ◽  
Mathematical Expressions ◽  
Mathematical Techniques ◽  
Neutral Models

This chapter describes a variety of approaches to modeling social learning, cultural evolution, and gene-culture coevolution. The model-building exercise typically starts with a set of assumptions about the key processes to be explored, along with the nature of their relations. These assumptions are then translated into the mathematical expressions that constitute the model. The operation of the model is then investigated, normally using a combination of analytical mathematical techniques and simulation, to determine relevant outcomes, such as the equilibrium states or patterns of change over time. The chapter presents examples of the modeling of cultural transmission and considers parallels between cultural and biological evolution. It then discusses theoretical approaches to social learning and cultural evolution, including population-genetic style models of cultural evolution and gene-culture coevolution, neutral models and random copying, social foraging theory, spatially explicit models, reaction-diffusion models, agent-based models, and phylogenetic models.

scholarly journals Pragmatics and Language Evolution

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marieke Woensdregt ◽  
Kenny Smith
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Social Learning ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Computational Models ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Language Evolution ◽  
Biological Evolution ◽  
Cognitive Capacity ◽  
Food Sources ◽  
Evolutionary Mechanisms

Pragmatics is the branch of linguistics that deals with language use in context. It looks at the meaning linguistic utterances can have beyond their literal meaning (implicature), and also at presupposition and turn taking in conversation. Thus, pragmatics lies on the interface between language and social cognition. From the point of view of both speaker and listener, doing pragmatics requires reasoning about the minds of others. For instance, a speaker has to think about what knowledge they share with the listener to choose what information to explicitly encode in their utterance and what to leave implicit. A listener has to make inferences about what the speaker meant based on the context, their knowledge about the speaker, and their knowledge of general conventions in language use. This ability to reason about the minds of others (usually referred to as “mindreading” or “theory of mind”) is a cognitive capacity that is uniquely developed in humans compared to other animals. What we know about how pragmatics (and the underlying ability to make inferences about the minds of others) has evolved. Biological evolution and cultural evolution are the two main processes that can lead to the development of a complex behavior over generations, and we can explore to what extent they account for what we know about pragmatics. In biological evolution, changes happen as a result of natural selection on genetically transmitted traits. In cultural evolution on the other hand, selection happens on skills that are transmitted through social learning. Many hypotheses have been put forward about the role that natural selection may have played in the evolution of social and communicative skills in humans (for example, as a result of changes in food sources, foraging strategy, or group size). The role of social learning and cumulative culture, however, has been often overlooked. This omission is particularly striking in the case of pragmatics, as language itself is a prime example of a culturally transmitted skill, and there is solid evidence that the pragmatic capacities that are so central to language use may themselves be partially shaped by social learning. In light of empirical findings from comparative, developmental, and experimental research, we can consider the potential contributions of both biological and cultural evolutionary mechanisms to the evolution of pragmatics. The dynamics of types of evolutionary processes can also be explored using experiments and computational models.

scholarly journals Cultura, adaptación y ciencias sociales: una aproximación naturalista

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laureano Castro ◽  
Luis Castro ◽  
Miguel Á. Castro ◽  
Miguel Á. Toro
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Parents And Children ◽  
Inheritance System

RESUMENEn la primera parte de este artículo defendemos que la evolución de la cultura en nuestra especie es consecuencia de una naturaleza humana esencialmente valorativa, la naturaleza de Homo suadens. La propuesta considera que nuestros antepasados homínidos dotados de la capacidad de aprobar y reprobar la conducta ajena desarrollaron un sistema de transmisión cultural assessor entre padres e hijos, el cual transformó el aprendizaje social en un sistema de herencia acumulativo. En la segunda parte, defendemos, desde nuestra condición de Homo suadens, la necesidad de reconceptualizar algunos de los problemas presentes en el núcleo teórico de las ciencias sociales.PALABRAS CLAVEAPRENDIZAJE SOCIAL, EVOLUCIÓN CULTURAL, TRANSMISIÓN ASSESSOR, HOMO SUADENSABSTRACTIn this paper, first we argue that the evolution of culture in our species is the result of an essentially evaluative human nature, the nature of Homo suadens. The proposal considers that our hominid ancestors endowed with the ability to approve or disapprove of the conduct of others developed a system of assessor cultural transmission between parents and children, who transformed social learning into a cumulative inheritance system. Second, we defend, from our Homo suadens condition, the need to reconceptualise some of the problems lying at the theoretical core of social sciences.KEY WORDSSOCIAL LEARNING, CULTURAL EVOLUTION, ASSESSOR TRANSMISSION, HOMO SUADENS

COMPLEX SYSTEMS IN LANGUAGE EVOLUTION: THE CULTURAL EMERGENCE OF COMPOSITIONAL STRUCTURE

2003 ◽  
Vol 06 (04) ◽  
pp. 537-558 ◽  
Author(s):  
KENNY SMITH ◽  
HENRY BRIGHTON ◽  
SIMON KIRBY
Keyword(s):  
Language Learners ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Complex Adaptive Systems ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Adaptive Systems ◽  
Language Evolution ◽  
Biological Evolution ◽  
Compositional Structure ◽  
Complex Adaptive ◽  
Iterated Learning

Language arises from the interaction of three complex adaptive systems — biological evolution, learning, and culture. We focus here on cultural evolution, and present an Iterated Learning Model of the emergence of compositionality, a fundamental structural property of language. Our main result is to show that the poverty of the stimulus available to language learners leads to a pressure for linguistic structure. When there is a bottleneck on cultural transmission, only a language which is generalizable from sparse input data is stable. Language itself evolves on a cultural time-scale, and compositionality is language's adaptation to stimulus poverty.

scholarly journals Social learning and the replication process: an experimental investigation

2015 ◽  
Vol 282 (1808) ◽  
pp. 20150719 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxime Derex ◽  
Romain Feron ◽  
Bernard Godelle ◽  
Michel Raymond
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Fitness Landscape ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Biological Evolution ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
Replication Process ◽  
Gradual Process ◽  
Observed Behaviour ◽  
Cultural Traits

Human cultural traits typically result from a gradual process that has been described as analogous to biological evolution. This observation has led pioneering scholars to draw inspiration from population genetics to develop a rigorous and successful theoretical framework of cultural evolution. Social learning, the mechanism allowing information to be transmitted between individuals, has thus been described as a simple replication mechanism. Although useful, the extent to which this idealization appropriately describes the actual social learning events has not been carefully assessed. Here, we used a specifically developed computer task to evaluate (i) the extent to which social learning leads to the replication of an observed behaviour and (ii) the consequences it has for fitness landscape exploration. Our results show that social learning does not lead to a dichotomous choice between disregarding and replicating social information. Rather, it appeared that individuals combine and transform information coming from multiple sources to produce new solutions. As a consequence, landscape exploration was promoted by the use of social information. These results invite us to rethink the way social learning is commonly modelled and could question the validity of predictions coming from models considering this process as replicative.

Ritual’s Evolutionary Landscapes

2021 ◽  
pp. 127-144
Author(s):  
Harvey Whitehouse
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Social Complexity ◽  
Epigenetic Landscape ◽  
Basic Model ◽  
Different Levels

Understanding the role of ritual in the evolution of social complexity requires attention to many complex, interacting processes operating at different levels. This chapter attempts to sort these out into a coherent overarching framework by building on the ideas of British biologist, philosopher, and polymath C. H. Waddington, who put forward the idea of an ‘epigenetic landscape’ to explain how organisms develop. Waddington’s basic model can be extended to explain how cognitive-developmental and social-historical landscapes unfold and how all three kinds of landscapes interact. Adopting this overarching perspective on cultural evolution helps bridge the unnecessary divisions among branches of evolutionary theory and psychology that emphasize distinct but potentially complementary aspects of social learning and cultural transmission.

scholarly journals Evolution of Speech

2018 ◽  
pp. 840-864
Author(s):  
Bart de Boer ◽  
Tessa Verhoef
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Vocal Communication ◽  
Biological Evolution ◽  
Speech Sounds ◽  
Evolutionary Time ◽  
Anatomical Structures ◽  
Evolution Of Speech ◽  
Anatomical Adaptations ◽  
Cognition And Culture

This chapter discusses the biological and cultural evolution of speech. It presents fossil and comparative evidence about how anatomical structures may have adapted to speech over evolutionary time and how this can help estimate when speech evolved. It also discusses how cultural transmission shapes systems of speech sounds, and how this is important to understand the biological evolution of cognitive adaptations to learning and using speech. It discusses experimental techniques to investigate cultural evolution of speech in a laboratory setting. From the evidence presented, it is likely that anatomical adaptations to complex vocal communication are at least as old as the latest common ancestor with Neanderthals (c 400 000 years ago), that cognitive adaptations are probably primary (and therefore even older than this), that cultural evolution is very important in shaping (systems of) speech sounds, and that therefore the evolution of speech was a complex co-evolution between anatomy, cognition, and culture.

scholarly journals Rules of thumb and cultural evolution: How simple heuristics have guided human adaptation and the emergence of cultural complexity

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roope Oskari Kaaronen ◽  
Mikael A. Manninen ◽  
Jussi T. Eronen
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Ecological Rationality ◽  
Simple Rules ◽  
Rules Of Thumb ◽  
Cumulative Cultural Evolution ◽  
Simple Heuristics

This article combines insights from ecological rationality and cultural evolution to illustrate how simple heuristics – colloquially, “rules of thumb” – have guided human behaviour and the evolution of complex cultures. Through a variety of examples and case studies, we discuss how human cultures have used rules of thumb in domains as diverse as foraging, resource management, social learning, moral judgment, and cultural niche construction. We propose four main arguments. Firstly, we argue that human societies have a rich cultural history in applying rules of thumb to guide daily activities and social organization. Second, we emphasise how rules of thumb may be convenient units of cultural transmission and high-fidelity social learning – the backbones of cumulative cultural evolution. Third, we highlight how rules of thumb can facilitate efficient decision making by making use of environmental and bodily features. Fourth, we discuss how simple rules of thumb may serve as building blocks for the emergence of more complex cultural patterns. This paper sets a research agenda for studying how simple rules contribute to cultural evolution in the past, the present, and the Anthropocene future.

scholarly journals Experiments in artificial culture: from noisy imitation to storytelling robots

2021 ◽  
Vol 377 (1843) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan F. T. Winfield ◽  
Susan Blackmore
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Collective Knowledge ◽  
Cumulative Culture ◽  
Artificial Culture ◽  
Simulation Based ◽  
Series Of Experiments ◽  
Recent Experimental Work

This paper presents a series of experiments in collective social robotics, spanning more than 10 years, with the long-term aim of building embodied models of (aspects of) cultural evolution. Initial experiments demonstrated the emergence of behavioural traditions in a group of social robots programmed to imitate each other’s behaviours (we call these Copybots). These experiments show that the noisy (i.e. less than perfect fidelity) imitation that comes for free with real physical robots gives rise naturally to variation in social learning. More recent experimental work extends the robots’ cognitive capabilities with simulation-based internal models, equipping them with a simple artificial theory of mind. With this extended capability we explore, in our current work, social learning not via imitation but robot–robot storytelling, in an effort to model this very human mode of cultural transmission. In this paper, we give an account of the methods and inspiration for these experiments, the experiments and their results, and an outline of possible directions for this programme of research. It is our hope that this paper stimulates not only discussion but suggestions for hypotheses to test with the Storybots. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines’.

The Spatial Scale of Social Learning Affects Cultural Diversity

2011 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. S. Premo ◽  
Jonathan B. Scholnick
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Spatial Scale ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Isolation By Distance ◽  
Neutral Theory ◽  
Genetic Transmission ◽  
Agent Based ◽  
Population Sizes ◽  
Biased Cultural Transmission

Sewall Wright's (1943) concept of isolation by distance is as germane to cultural transmission as genetic transmission. Yet there has been little research on how the spatial scale of social learning—the geographic extent of cultural transmission—affects cultural diversity. Here, we employ agent-based simulation to study how the spatial scale of unbiased social learning affects selectively neutral cultural diversity over a range of population sizes and densities. We show that highly localized unbiased cultural transmission may be easily confused with a form of biased cultural transmission, especially in low-density populations. Our results have important implications for how archaeologists infer mechanisms of cultural transmission from diversity estimates that depart from the expectations of neutral theory.

scholarly journals Pragmatics and Language Evolution

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marieke Woensdregt ◽  
Kenny Smith
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Social Learning ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Language Evolution ◽  
Biological Evolution ◽  
Cognitive Capacity ◽  
Food Sources ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Oxford University Press

Pragmatics is the branch of linguistics that deals with language use in context. It looks at the meaning linguistic utterances can have beyond their literal meaning (implicature), and also at presupposition and turn taking in conversation. Thus, pragmatics lies on the interface between language and social cognition.From the point of view of both speaker and listener, doing pragmatics requires reasoning about the minds of others. For instance, a speaker has to think about what knowledge they share with the listener to choose what information to explicitly encode in their utterance and what to leave implicit. A listener has to make inferences about what the speaker meant based on the context, their knowledge about the speaker, and their knowledge of general conventions in language use. This ability to reason about the minds of others (usually referred to as “mindreading” or “theory of mind”) is a cognitive capacity that is uniquely developed in humans compared to other animals.What we know about how pragmatics (and the underlying ability to make inferences about the minds of others) has evolved. Biological evolution and cultural evolution are the two main processes that can lead to the development of a complex behavior over generations, and we can explore to what extent they account for what we know about pragmatics.In biological evolution, changes happen as a result of natural selection on genetically transmitted traits. In cultural evolution on the other hand, selection happens on skills that are transmitted through social learning. Many hypotheses have been put forward about the role that natural selection may have played in the evolution of social and communicative skills in humans (for example, as a result of changes in food sources, foraging strategy, or group size). The role of social learning and cumulative culture, however, has been often overlooked. This omission is particularly striking in the case of pragmatics, as language itself is a prime example of a culturally transmitted skill, and there is solid evidence that the pragmatic capacities that are so central to language use may themselves be partially shaped by social learning.In light of empirical findings from comparative, developmental, and experimental research, we can consider the potential contributions of both biological and cultural evolutionary mechanisms to the evolution of pragmatics. The dynamics of types of evolutionary processes can also be explored using experiments and computational models.Woensdregt, M., & Smith, K. (2017). Pragmatics and Language Evolution. In Aronoff, M. (Ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.321. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press. Published version available at: http://linguistics.oxfordre.com/abstract/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.001.0001/acrefore-9780199384655-e-321?rskey=YdHgxy&result=18

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