Through cultural transmission, repeated learning by new individuals transforms cultural information, which tends to become increasingly compressible . Existing diffusion chain studies include in their design two processes that could be responsible for this tendency: learning and reproducing . This paper manipulates the presence of learning in a simple iterated drawing design experiment. We find that learning seems to be the causal factor behind the increase in compressibility observed in the transmitted information, while reproducing is a source of random heritable (...) innovations. Only a theory invoking these two aspects of cultural learning will be able to explain human culture's fundamental balance between stability and innovation. (shrink)

We investigate the emergence of iconicity, specifically a bouba-kiki effect in miniature artificial languages under different functional constraints: when the languages are reproduced and when they are used communicatively. We ran transmission chains of participant dyads who played an interactive communicative game and individual participants who played a matched learning game. An analysis of the languages over six generations in an iterated learning experiment revealed that in the Communication condition, but not in the Reproduction condition, words for spiky shapes tend (...) to be rated by naive judges as more spiky than the words for round shapes. This suggests that iconicity may not only be the outcome of innovations introduced by individuals, but, crucially, the result of interlocutor negotiation of new communicative conventions. We interpret our results as an illustration of cultural evolution by random mutation and selection. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 45, Issue 11, November 2021.

The distribution of cultural variants in a population is shaped by both neutral evolutionary dynamics and by selection pressures. The temporal dynamics of social network connectivity, that is, the order in which individuals in a population interact with each other, has been largely unexplored. In this paper, we investigate how, in a fully connected social network, connectivity dynamics, alone and in interaction with different cognitive biases, affect the evolution of cultural variants. Using agent‐based computer simulations, we manipulate population connectivity dynamics (...) (early, mid, and late full‐population connectivity); content bias, or a preference for high‐quality variants; coordination bias, or whether agents tend to use self‐produced variants (egocentric bias), or to switch to variants observed in others (allocentric bias); and memory size, or the number of items that agents can store in their memory. We show that connectivity dynamics affect the time‐course of variant spread, with lower connectivity slowing down convergence of the population onto a single cultural variant. We also show that, compared to a neutral evolutionary model, content bias accelerates convergence and amplifies the effects of connectivity dynamics, while larger memory size and coordination bias, especially egocentric bias, slow down convergence. Furthermore, connectivity dynamics affect the frequency of high‐quality variants (adaptiveness), with late connectivity populations showing bursts of rapid change in adaptiveness followed by periods of relatively slower change, and early connectivity populations following a single‐peak evolutionary dynamic. We evaluate our simulations against existing data collected from previous experiments and show how our model reproduces the empirical patterns of convergence. (shrink)

The present study explores the idea that human linguistic communication co-opted a pre-existing population-wide behavioural system that was shared among social group members and whose structure reflected the structure of the environment. This system is hypothesized to have emerged from interactions among individuals who had evolved the capacity to imitate arbitrary, functionless behaviour. A series of agent-based computer simulations test the separate and joint effects of imitation, pattern completion behaviour, environment structure and level of social interaction on such a population-wide (...) behavioural system. The results support the view that a system that could be co-opted for linguistic communication might arise in a population of agents equipped with arbitrary imitation for the purposes of pattern completion interacting in certain kinds of structured environments. Such pre-linguistic behavioural system could have bootstrapped communication and paved the way for biological capacities widely believed to be necessary for communication, such as shared intentionality and symbolicity, to evolve. (shrink)

The present study explores the idea that human linguistic communication co-opted a pre-existing population-wide behavioural system that was shared among social group members and whose structure reflected the structure of the environment. This system is hypothesized to have emerged from interactions among individuals who had evolved the capacity to imitate arbitrary, functionless behaviour. A series of agent-based computer simulations test the separate and joint effects of imitation, pattern completion behaviour, environment structure and level of social interaction on such a population-wide (...) behavioural system. The results support the view that a system that could be co-opted for linguistic communication might arise in a population of agents equipped with arbitrary imitation for the purposes of pattern completion interacting in certain kinds of structured environments. Such pre-linguistic behavioural system could have bootstrapped communication and paved the way for biological capacities widely believed to be necessary for communication, such as shared intentionality and symbolicity, to evolve. (shrink)