Related papers: Cultural evolution and personalization
We consider a Moran-type model of cultural evolution, which describes how traits emerge, are transmitted, and get lost in populations. Our analysis focuses on the underlying cultural genealogies; they were first described by Aguilar and…
Here we study polysemy as a potential learning bias in vocabulary learning in children. Words of low polysemy could be preferred as they reduce the disambiguation effort for the listener. However, such preference could be a side-effect of…
Categorization is a fundamental function of minds, with wide ranging implications for the rest of the cognitive system. In humans, categories are shared and communicated between minds, thus requiring explanations at the population level. In…
Recent studies have shown that human populations have experienced a complex demographic history, including a recent epoch of rapid population growth that led to an excess in the proportion of rare genetic variants in humans today. This…
Experimental evolution has yielded surprising insights into human history and evolution by shedding light on the roles of chance and contingency in history and evolution, and on the deep evolutionary roots of cooperation, conflict and kin…
We consider two versions of stochastic population models with mutation and selection. The first approach relies on a multitype branching process; here, individuals reproduce and change type (i.e., mutate) independently of each other,…
Understanding the mechanisms underlying the formation of cultural traits, such as preferences, opinions and beliefs is an open challenge. Trait formation is intimately connected to cultural dynamics, which has been the focus of a variety of…
Many cultural traits characterizing intelligent behaviors are now thought to be transmitted through statistical learning, motivating us to study its effects on cultural evolution. We conduct a large-scale music data analysis and observe…
Demographic inference from text has received a surge of attention in the field of natural language processing in the last decade. In this paper, we use personal names to infer religion in South Asia - where religion is a salient social…
We are living in an uncertain and dynamically changing world, where optimal decision-making under uncertainty is directly linked to the survival of species. However, evolutionary selection pressures that shape value-based decision-making…
Traditionally, population models distinguish individuals on the basis of their current state. Given a distribution, a discrete time model then specifies (precisely in deterministic models, probabilistically in stochastic models) the…
Our understanding of risk preferences can be sharpened by considering their evolutionary basis. The existing literature has focused on two sources of risk: idiosyncratic risk and aggregate risk. We introduce a new source of risk, heritable…
An evolutionary model for emergence of diversity in language is developed. We investigated the effects of two real life observations, namely, people prefer people that they communicate with well, and people interact with people that are…
How do shared conventions emerge in complex decentralized social systems? This question engages fields as diverse as linguistics, sociology and cognitive science. Previous empirical attempts to solve this puzzle all presuppose that formal…
Humans interact with each other on a daily basis by developing and maintaining various social norms and it is critical to form a deeper understanding of how such norms develop, how they change, and how fast they change. In this work, we…
There is little doubt in scientific circles that--counting from the origin of life towards today--evolution has led to an increase in the amount of information stored within the genomes of the biosphere. This trend of increasing information…
The goal of this paper is to provide mathematically rigorous tools for modelling the evolution of a community of interacting individuals. We model the population by a measure space where the measure determines the abundance of individual…
This study deals with a fairly simply formulated problem -- how to estimate the number of people bearing the same full name in a large population. Estimation of name popularity can leverage personal name matching in databases and be of…
Naming is very important in software development, as names are often the only vehicle of meaning about what the code is intended to do. A recent study on how developers choose names collected the names given by different developers for the…
We consider neutral evolution of a large population subject to changes in its population size. For a population with a time-variable carrying capacity we have computed the distributions of the total branch lengths of its sample genealogies.…