Greater learnability is not sufficient to produce cultural universals (original) (raw)
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Exploring the relationship between learnability and linguistic universals
2011
Abstract Greater learnability has been offered as an explanation as to why certain properties appear in human languages more frequently than others. Languages with greater learnability are more likely to be accurately transmitted from one generation of learners to the next. We explore whether such a learnability bias is sufficient to result in a property becoming prevalent across languages by formalizing language transmission using a linear model.
The first crank of the cultural ratchet: Learning and transmitting concepts through language
2019
Human knowledge accumulates over generations, amplifying our individual learning abilities. What is the mechanism of this accumulation? Here, we explore how language allows accurate transmission of conceptual knowledge. We introduce a novel experimental paradigm that allows direct comparison of learning from examples and learning from language. In our experiment, a teacher first learns a Boolean concept from examples; they then communicate this concept to a student in a free conversation; finally, we test both teacher and student on the same transfer items. We find that learning from language is both sufficient and efficient: Students achieve accuracy very close to their teachers, while studying for less time. We then explore the language used by teachers and find heavy reliance on generics and quantifiers. Taken together, these results suggest that cultural accumulation of conceptual knowledge arises from the ability of language to directly convey generalizations.
Theoretical and empirical evidence for the impact of inductive biases on cultural evolution
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2008
The question of how much the outcomes of cultural evolution are shaped by the cognitive capacities of human learners has been explored in several disciplines, including psychology, anthropology and linguistics. We address this question through a detailed investigation of transmission chains, in which each person passes information to another along a chain. We review mathematical and empirical evidence that shows that under general conditions, and across experimental paradigms, the information passed along transmission chains will be affected by the inductive biases of the people involved-the constraints on learning and memory, which influence conclusions from limited data. The mathematical analysis considers the case where each person is a rational Bayesian agent. The empirical work consists of behavioural experiments in which human participants are shown to operate in the manner predicted by the Bayesian framework. Specifically, in situations in which each person's response is used to determine the data seen by the next person, people converge on concepts consistent with their inductive biases irrespective of the information seen by the first member of the chain. We then relate the Bayesian analysis of transmission chains to models of biological evolution, clarifying how chains of individuals correspond to population-level models and how selective forces can be incorporated into our models. Taken together, these results indicate how laboratory studies of transmission chains can provide information about the dynamics of cultural evolution and illustrate that inductive biases can have a significant impact on these dynamics.
The adoption of cultural variants by learners is affected by multiple factors including the prestige of the model and the frequency and value of the different variants. However, little is known about what affects onward cultural transmission, or the choice of variants that models produce to pass on to new learners. This study investigated the effects of congruence between two contexts on this choice: the one in which we learn variants and the one in which we transmit them later on. We hypothesized that when we are placed in a particular context, we will be more likely to produce (and therefore transmit) variants that we learned in that same context. In particular, we tested the effect of a social contextual aspect: the relationship between model and learner. Participants learned two variant methods to solve a puzzle, one from an “expert” (in an expert-to-novice context) and one from a “peer” (in a peer-to-peer context). They were then asked to transmit one variant onward, either to ...
2013
This note originated in 2003 as a set of rough notes as Madsen learned description logics, RDF, and semantic web technologies for a (now defunct) startup company. He wrote it up in 2007 as a formal proposal, which was sidelined until 2013, when it became a focus of work for Madsen and Lipo as a collaboration. In detail, this note has been somewhat deprecated by years of developments in semantic information systems and knowledge representation, but it remains an artifact of the our first explorations of the connection between CT models and semantic models. Such models continue to be essential today, to allow us to understand how various social learning processes are conditioned not just by space, population structure, or cognitive bias, but by the actual content of the information being transmitted. Discussion of CT models that have semantic content between traits have remained verbal and heuristic, and formal models of transmission continue to locate all of the deep content in CT pr...
A bias for social information in human cultural transmission
British Journal of Psychology, 2006
Evolutionary theories concerning the origins of human intelligence suggest that cultural transmission might be biased toward social over non-social information. This was tested by passing social and non-social information along multiple chains of participants. Experiment 1 found that gossip, defined as information about intense third-party social relationships, was transmitted with siginificantly greater accuracy and in significantly greater quantity than equivalent non-social information concerning individual behaviour or the physical environment. Experiment 2 replicated this finding controlling for narrative coherence, and additionally found that information concerning everyday nongossip social interactions was transmitted just as well as the intense gossip interactions. It was therefore concluded that human cultural transmission is biased toward information concerning social interactions over equivalent non-social information. In seeking to investigate the social nature of memory, Bartlett (1932) formulated the 'transmission chain method', in which material, typically a text, is passed through a chain of participants, in a manner similar to the children's game 'Chinese whispers' or 'broken telephone'. The first participant reads the material, and is later asked to recall it. The resultant recall is then given to the second participant to reproduce, whose recall is in turn given to the third, and so on along the chain. Using this method, Bartlett demonstrated that traditional folk tales were transmitted more fully than a range of other stimuli, such as a newspaper report, a description of a scene and a scientific text. In the following two decades, a series of transmission chain studies were published in the
Context congruence: How associative learning modulates cultural evolution
PLOS ONE, 2023
The adoption of cultural variants by learners is affected by multiple factors including the prestige of the model and the value and frequency of different variants. However, little is known about what affects onward cultural transmission, or the choice of variants that models produce to pass on to new learners. This study investigated the effects on this choice of congruence between two contexts: the one in which variants are learned and the one in which they are later transmitted on. We hypothesized that when we are placed in a particular context, we will be more likely to produce (and therefore transmit) variants that we learned in that same (congruent) context. In particular, we tested the effect of a social contextual aspect-the relationship between model and learner. Our participants learned two methods to solve a puzzle, a variant from an "expert" (in an expert-to-novice context) and another one from a "peer" (in a peer-to-peer context). They were then asked to transmit one method onward, either to a "novice" (in a new expert-to-novice context) or to another "peer" (in a new peer-to-peer context). Participants were, overall, more likely to transmit the variant learned from an expert, evidencing an effect of by prestige bias. Crucially, in support of our hypothesis, they were also more likely to transmit the variant they had learned in the congruent context. Parameter estimation computer simulations of the experiment revealed that congruence bias was stronger than prestige bias.
Repeated learning makes cultural evolution unique
Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences, 2009
Although genetic information is acquired only once, cultural information can be both abandoned and reacquired during an individual's lifetime. Therefore, cultural evolution will be determined not only by cultural traits' ability to spread but also by how good they are at sticking with an individual; however, the evolutionary consequences of this aspect of culture have not previously been explored. Here we show that repeated learning and multiple characteristics of cultural traits make cultural evolution unique, allowing dynamical phenomena we can recognize as specifically cultural, such as traits that both spread quickly and disappear quickly. Importantly, the analysis of our model also yields a theoretical objection to the popular suggestion that biological and cultural evolution can be understood in similar terms. We find that the possibility to predict long-term cultural evolution by some success index, analogous to biological fitness, depends on whether individuals have few or many opportunities to learn. If learning opportunities are few, we find that the existence of a success index may be logically impossible, rendering notions of "cultural fitness" meaningless. On the other hand, if individuals can learn many times, we find a success index that works, regardless of whether the transmission pattern is vertical, oblique, or horizontal. cultural fitness | diffusion | retention I n this paper, we will address the popular suggestion that biological and cultural evolution can be understood in similar terms (1-8).