Cognitive agency in sociocultural evolution

Models of sociocultural evolution generally study the population dynamics of cultural traits given known biases in social learning. Cognitive agency, understood as the dynamics underlying a specific agent’s adoption of a given trait, is essentially irrelevant in this framework. This article argues that although implementing and instrumenting agency in computational models is fundamentally challenging, it is ultimately possible and would help us overcome major limitations in our understanding of sociocultural dynamics.Indeed, the behaviour of humans is not causally generated by a set of predefined behavioural laws, but by the situated activity of their cognitive architecture. Idealised models of biased transmission certainly help us understand specific features of population dynamics. However, they distract us from the deep intrication of the cognitive and ecological processes underlying sociocultural evolution, and erase their embodied, subjective nature.In line with the earlier “Thinking Through Other Minds” account of sociocultural evolution, this article highlights how the Active Inference framework can help us implement and instrument computational models that address these limitations. Such models would not only help ground our understanding of sociocultural evolution in the underlying cognitive dynamics, but also help solve (or frame) open questions in the study of ritual, relation between cultural transmission and innovation, as well as scales of cultural evolution.

Material Methods; Considering Ceramic Raw Materials and the Spread of the Potter‘s Wheel in Early Iron Age Southern Iberia

This paper discusses the role of clay selection and preparation in the production of wheel-made pottery in Early Iron Age southern Iberia. The first systematic use of potter’s wheels in the production of Early Iron Age ceramics in southern Iberia corresponds to the establishment of pottery workshops associated with Phoenician trade colonies, dating to the period between the end of the 10th and 7th century BCE. There are still many gaps in our understanding of how technological knowledge was transmitted between the Phoenician workshops and “indigenous’ communities that adopted the potter’s wheel. This paper draws upon a growing body of archaeometric and ceramic technological research to consider clay selection strategies in these new workshops. Secondly, this paper will consider the role of ceramic raw materials in the development of new “hybrid’ ceramic forms, particularly grey-ware. It will hereby provide theoretical considerations surrounding the significance of material cultural hybridity in answering questions raised by postcolonial archaeologists about identity, cultural transmission and hybridisation in the context of the Phoenician colonial system.

Do nonhuman animals reason about prestige-based status?

Status is a complex, but crucially important, aspect of life across species. In recent decades, researchers have made significant contributions to our understanding of both the pathways by which status can be attained, as well as our underlying capacities for reasoning about these pathways. In 2001, Henrich & Gil-White proposed a prestige-based pathway to status where low status actors willingly defer to competent or knowledgeable high status actors, as a means of facilitating social learning and cultural transmission. Although this type of status hierarchy, and the capacity to reason about it, was hypothesized to be unique to humans, here I argue that there are several reasons why we might observe prestige-based status, and the capacity for reasoning about this pathway to status, in some nonhuman species as well. These reasons focus on the prevalence, importance, and sophistication of social learning in certain taxa, as well as the marked variation in hierarchy characteristics and structure across species. I point out places where our current methodologies encounter difficulties distinguishing whether a hierarchy in the wild is based on dominance or prestige, where our experimental methods leave us unable to assess whether an individual is reasoning about a high status actor as being prestigious or formidable, and provide suggestions for addressing these limitations. Adopting a comparative approach will clarify whether prestige-based status truly is unique to humans, and—if not—precisely what selective pressures facilitate the emergence of prestige-based status and the capacity for reasoning about it.

“East-West, West-East”: Cultural Transmission and Exchange of Yorùbá Religious Wood-Carvings between Ọ̀yó̩, Sábẹ and Ifè̩-Ana

In the early part of the 18th century, and at the height of its political power, the old Òyọ́ ̩ Empire established its hegemony over Sábẹ, Benin Republic, and new Yorùbá communities were founded in Sábẹ. Yorùbá communities also exist at Ifè̩-Ana in the Atakpame region of Togo. The Ifè̩-Ana Yorùbá were migrants from Ilé-Ifè between the 16 ̩ th and 18th centuries. In these new Yorùbá communities, the people continued with the worship of traditional Yorùbá religion and the use of wood-carvings for this worship. This study employs historical and ethnographic methods to establish the presence of traditional Yorùbá religion in Òyọ́ ̩, Sábẹ and Ifè̩-Ana. It then identifies and classifies extant Yorùbá wood-carving paraphernalia in the worship of Ifá, Ṣàngó, Egúngún, Gẹlẹdẹ, and Ìbejì that were transferred from Ò ́ yọ́ ̩ to Sábẹ and Ifè̩-Ana. The study observes a cultural interrelationship moving from east to west and west to east among the communities.

Exhaustion and Recycling

This paper examines the works of representative modernist authors who have rewritten the myth of the Danaids in a self-reflective way. They reuse certain elements of the myth in order to address some of the crucial issues of cultural transmission: interpretation, poetic tradition and communication. The argument focuses on the recycling of the myth of the Danaids as a symbol of endless historical-philological (Nietzsche) and psychological (Freud) interpretations, the exhaustion and the reinvention of the classical literary tradition (Babits), and the impossible possibility of mediating the living voice through telephonic communication (Proust).

Visionary women: Sustaining the language and culture in Samoan early childhood centres

This article focuses on the powerful role of Samoan women sustaining the language and culture in Aotearoa. It presents findings from my Master’s thesis that explored the experiences of seven Samoan women who were involved in the establishment of three a’oga amata (Samoan early childhood centres) in Christchurch (Togiaso, 2017). This qualitative study had a conceptual framework of Pacific epistemologies including fa’a Samoa (a Samoan way of life) and teu le vā (to look after spaces). Questionnaires, semistructured interviews, and autoethnography were methods used. Findings revealed that Samoan women overcame major barriers and challenges in setting up unique spaces of learning that became places of belonging and cultural transmission for children, families, and the community. However, colonial incursions continue to be barriers in sustaining the Samoan language, culture, and fa’a Samoa.

Factor Analysis about Indonesian Students’ Motivations to Study in China Based on Push-Pull Theory

Based on the push-pull model, the study is aimed at testing 116 China (Jiangsu Province) overseas students’ travel motivations with the methods of factor analysis，ANOVA analysis, and independent t -test to explain internal and external factors, which influence overseas students’ travel decision, and further improve overseas students travel market. The results show that leisure and relaxation, togetherness and socialization, and knowledge and culture are top three push factors, while special festivals, historical sites, and financial budgets are top three pull factors. Among sociodemographic factors, gender differences, lengths of visit in China, and main income sources have significant differences in overseas students travel decisions. With “One belt, one road” initiative, travel industries should precisely understand overseas students traveling preferences, explore travelling market layout to balance economic benefits and cultural transmission, and develop overseas students’ traveling destination groups.

Generalised Trust among Second-Generation Muslim and Non-Muslim Minority Groups in Europe

This study compares generalised trust between second-generation Muslim and non- Muslim migrant groups in Europe, and examines the effect on trust of discrimination and cultural transmission. Analysis of data from the European Social Survey of 4,687 respondents in 32 European countries shows that second-generation Muslim groups have lower levels of trust than second-generation non-Muslim minority groups. The findings provide no evidence that Muslims’ lower levels of trust are due to discrimination and exclusion. Rather, results indicate that the differences are due to cultural transmission: Muslim groups originate more often from low-trust societies, and generalised trust is transmitted from one generation to the next.

From improvisation to learning: how naturalness and systematicity shape language evolution

Silent gesture studies, in which hearing participants from different linguistic backgrounds produce gestures to communicate events, have been used to test hypotheses about the cognitive biases that govern cross-linguistic word order preferences. In particular, the differential use of SOV and SVO order to communicate, respectively, extensional events (where the direct object exists independently of the event; e.g., girl throws ball) and intensional events (where the meaning of the direct object is potentially dependent on the verb; e.g., girl thinks of ball), has been suggested to represent a natural preference, demonstrated in improvisation contexts. However, natural languages tend to prefer systematic word orders, where a single order is used regardless of the event being communicated. We present a series of studies that investigate ordering preferences for SOV and SVO orders using an online forced-choice experiment, where participants select orders for different events i) in the absence of conventions and ii) after learning event-order mappings in different frequencies in a regularisation experiment. Our results show that natural ordering preferences arise in the absence of conventions, replicating previous findings from production experiments. In addition, we show that participants regularise the input they learn in the manual modality in two ways, such that, while the preference for systematic order patterns increases through learning, it exists in competition with the natural ordering preference, that conditions order on the semantics of the event. Using our experimental data in a computational model of cultural transmission, we show that this pattern is expected to persist over generations, suggesting that we should expect to see evidence of semantically-conditioned word order variability in at least some languages.

Cumulative cultural evolution, population structure and the origin of combinatoriality in human language

Language is the primary repository and mediator of human collective knowledge. A central question for evolutionary linguistics is the origin of the combinatorial structure of language (sometimes referred to as duality of patterning), one of language’s basic design features. Emerging sign languages provide a promising arena to study the emergence of language properties. Many, but not all such sign languages exhibit combinatoriality, which generates testable hypotheses about its source. We hypothesize that combinatoriality is the inevitable result of learning biases in cultural transmission, and that population structure explains differences across languages. We construct an agent-based model with population turnover. Bayesian learning agents with a prior preference for compressible languages (modelling a pressure for language learnability) communicate in pairs under pressure to reduce ambiguity. We include two transmission conditions: agents learn the language either from the oldest agent or from an agent in the middle of their lifespan. Results suggest that (1) combinatoriality emerges during iterated cultural transmission under concurrent pressures for simplicity and expressivity and (2) population dynamics affect the rate of evolution, which is faster when agents learn from other learners than when they learn from old individuals. This may explain its absence in some emerging sign languages. We discuss the consequences of this finding for cultural evolution, highlighting the interplay of population-level, functional and cognitive factors. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines’.