Andrew Whiten - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Andrew Whiten
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2021
A key goal of conservation is to protect biodiversity by supporting the long-term persistence of ... more A key goal of conservation is to protect biodiversity by supporting the long-term persistence of viable, natural populations of wild species. Conservation practice has long been guided by genetic, ecological and demographic indicators of risk. Emerging evidence of animal culture across diverse taxa and its role as a driver of evolutionary diversification, population structure and demographic processes may be essential for augmenting these conventional conservation approaches and decision-making. Animal culture was the focus of a ground-breaking resolution under the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), an international treaty operating under the UN Environment Programme. Here, we synthesize existing evidence to demonstrate how social learning and animal culture interact with processes important to conservation management. Specifically, we explore how social learning might influence population viability and be an important resource in response to ...
Evolution and Human Behavior, 2020
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019
Journal of Comparative Psychology, 2018
Cognitive Development, 2018
Animal cognition, Jan 19, 2018
Studies of transmission biases in social learning have greatly informed our understanding of how ... more Studies of transmission biases in social learning have greatly informed our understanding of how behaviour patterns may diffuse through animal populations, yet within-species inter-individual variation in social information use has received little attention and remains poorly understood. We have addressed this question by examining individual performances across multiple experiments with the same population of primates. We compiled a dataset spanning 16 social learning studies (26 experimental conditions) carried out at the same study site over a 12-year period, incorporating a total of 167 chimpanzees. We applied a binary scoring system to code each participant's performance in each study according to whether they demonstrated evidence of using social information from conspecifics to solve the experimental task or not (Social Information Score-'SIS'). Bayesian binomial mixed effects models were then used to estimate the extent to which individual differences influenced ...
Journal of Comparative Psychology, 2017
The Spanish Journal of Psychology, 2017
The comparative and evolutionary analysis of social learning and all manner of cultural processes... more The comparative and evolutionary analysis of social learning and all manner of cultural processes has become a flourishing field. Applying the ‘comparative method’ to such phenomena allows us to exploit the good fortunate we have in being able to study them in satisfying detail in our living primate relatives, using the results to reconstruct the cultural cognition of the ancestral forms we share with these species. Here I offer an overview of principal discoveries in recent years, organized through a developing scheme that targets three main dimensions of culture: the patterning of culturally transmitted traditions in time and space; the underlying social learning processes; and the particular behavioral and psychological contents of cultures. I focus on a comparison between humans, particularly children, and our closest primate relative the chimpanzee, for which we now have much the richest database of relevant observational and experimental findings. Commonalities across these si...
The International Encyclopedia of Primatology, 2017
PloS one, 2016
This study examined whether instrumental and normative learning contexts differentially influence... more This study examined whether instrumental and normative learning contexts differentially influence 4- to 7-year-old children's social learning strategies; specifically, their dispositions to copy an expert versus a majority consensus. Experiment 1 (N = 44) established that children copied a relatively competent "expert" individual over an incompetent individual in both kinds of learning context. In experiment 2 (N = 80) we then tested whether children would copy a competent individual versus a majority, in each of the two different learning contexts. Results showed that individual children differed in strategy, preferring with significant consistency across two different test trials to copy either the competent individual or the majority. This study is the first to show that children prefer to copy more competent individuals when shown competing methods of achieving an instrumental goal (Experiment 1) and provides new evidence that children, at least in our "indivi...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Jan 6, 2007
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2008
In this paper, we explore how experimental studies of cultural transmission in adult humans can a... more In this paper, we explore how experimental studies of cultural transmission in adult humans can address general questions regarding the ‘who, what, when and how’ of human cultural transmission, and consequently inform a theory of human cultural evolution. Three methods are discussed. The transmission chain method, in which information is passed along linear chains of participants, has been used to identify content biases in cultural transmission. These concern the kind of information that is transmitted. Several such candidate content biases have now emerged from the experimental literature. The replacement method, in which participants in groups are gradually replaced or moved across groups, has been used to study phenomena such as cumulative cultural evolution, cultural group selection and cultural innovation. The closed-group method, in which participants learn in groups with no replacement, has been used to explore issues such as who people choose to learn from and when they lea...
Learning & Behavior, 2010
Journal of Comparative Psychology, 2007
Current Anthropology, 1994
British Journal of Psychology, 2011
Recent research has revealed a striking tendency in young children to imitate even causally irrel... more Recent research has revealed a striking tendency in young children to imitate even causally irrelevant actions, a phenomenon dubbed ‘over‐imitation’. To investigate whether children develop beyond this, we allowed both adults and children to witness either a child or adult model performing goal‐relevant and goal‐irrelevant actions to extract a reward from a transparent puzzle box. Surprisingly, copying of irrelevant actions increased with age, with the adults performing the task with less efficiency than the children. Participants of all ages were more likely to perform the irrelevant actions performed by an adult model, than by a child model. These results suggest that people may become more imitative as they mature, whilst selectively copying particular models with a high level of fidelity. We suggest that this combination of faithful copying and selectivity underwrites the powerful social learning necessary for the level of cultural transmission on which our species depends.
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2021
A key goal of conservation is to protect biodiversity by supporting the long-term persistence of ... more A key goal of conservation is to protect biodiversity by supporting the long-term persistence of viable, natural populations of wild species. Conservation practice has long been guided by genetic, ecological and demographic indicators of risk. Emerging evidence of animal culture across diverse taxa and its role as a driver of evolutionary diversification, population structure and demographic processes may be essential for augmenting these conventional conservation approaches and decision-making. Animal culture was the focus of a ground-breaking resolution under the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), an international treaty operating under the UN Environment Programme. Here, we synthesize existing evidence to demonstrate how social learning and animal culture interact with processes important to conservation management. Specifically, we explore how social learning might influence population viability and be an important resource in response to ...
Evolution and Human Behavior, 2020
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019
Journal of Comparative Psychology, 2018
Cognitive Development, 2018
Animal cognition, Jan 19, 2018
Studies of transmission biases in social learning have greatly informed our understanding of how ... more Studies of transmission biases in social learning have greatly informed our understanding of how behaviour patterns may diffuse through animal populations, yet within-species inter-individual variation in social information use has received little attention and remains poorly understood. We have addressed this question by examining individual performances across multiple experiments with the same population of primates. We compiled a dataset spanning 16 social learning studies (26 experimental conditions) carried out at the same study site over a 12-year period, incorporating a total of 167 chimpanzees. We applied a binary scoring system to code each participant's performance in each study according to whether they demonstrated evidence of using social information from conspecifics to solve the experimental task or not (Social Information Score-'SIS'). Bayesian binomial mixed effects models were then used to estimate the extent to which individual differences influenced ...
Journal of Comparative Psychology, 2017
The Spanish Journal of Psychology, 2017
The comparative and evolutionary analysis of social learning and all manner of cultural processes... more The comparative and evolutionary analysis of social learning and all manner of cultural processes has become a flourishing field. Applying the ‘comparative method’ to such phenomena allows us to exploit the good fortunate we have in being able to study them in satisfying detail in our living primate relatives, using the results to reconstruct the cultural cognition of the ancestral forms we share with these species. Here I offer an overview of principal discoveries in recent years, organized through a developing scheme that targets three main dimensions of culture: the patterning of culturally transmitted traditions in time and space; the underlying social learning processes; and the particular behavioral and psychological contents of cultures. I focus on a comparison between humans, particularly children, and our closest primate relative the chimpanzee, for which we now have much the richest database of relevant observational and experimental findings. Commonalities across these si...
The International Encyclopedia of Primatology, 2017
PloS one, 2016
This study examined whether instrumental and normative learning contexts differentially influence... more This study examined whether instrumental and normative learning contexts differentially influence 4- to 7-year-old children's social learning strategies; specifically, their dispositions to copy an expert versus a majority consensus. Experiment 1 (N = 44) established that children copied a relatively competent "expert" individual over an incompetent individual in both kinds of learning context. In experiment 2 (N = 80) we then tested whether children would copy a competent individual versus a majority, in each of the two different learning contexts. Results showed that individual children differed in strategy, preferring with significant consistency across two different test trials to copy either the competent individual or the majority. This study is the first to show that children prefer to copy more competent individuals when shown competing methods of achieving an instrumental goal (Experiment 1) and provides new evidence that children, at least in our "indivi...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Jan 6, 2007
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2008
In this paper, we explore how experimental studies of cultural transmission in adult humans can a... more In this paper, we explore how experimental studies of cultural transmission in adult humans can address general questions regarding the ‘who, what, when and how’ of human cultural transmission, and consequently inform a theory of human cultural evolution. Three methods are discussed. The transmission chain method, in which information is passed along linear chains of participants, has been used to identify content biases in cultural transmission. These concern the kind of information that is transmitted. Several such candidate content biases have now emerged from the experimental literature. The replacement method, in which participants in groups are gradually replaced or moved across groups, has been used to study phenomena such as cumulative cultural evolution, cultural group selection and cultural innovation. The closed-group method, in which participants learn in groups with no replacement, has been used to explore issues such as who people choose to learn from and when they lea...
Learning & Behavior, 2010
Journal of Comparative Psychology, 2007
Current Anthropology, 1994
British Journal of Psychology, 2011
Recent research has revealed a striking tendency in young children to imitate even causally irrel... more Recent research has revealed a striking tendency in young children to imitate even causally irrelevant actions, a phenomenon dubbed ‘over‐imitation’. To investigate whether children develop beyond this, we allowed both adults and children to witness either a child or adult model performing goal‐relevant and goal‐irrelevant actions to extract a reward from a transparent puzzle box. Surprisingly, copying of irrelevant actions increased with age, with the adults performing the task with less efficiency than the children. Participants of all ages were more likely to perform the irrelevant actions performed by an adult model, than by a child model. These results suggest that people may become more imitative as they mature, whilst selectively copying particular models with a high level of fidelity. We suggest that this combination of faithful copying and selectivity underwrites the powerful social learning necessary for the level of cultural transmission on which our species depends.