Related papers: An Agent-based Model of the Cognitive Mechanisms U…
Cumulative cultural evolution is what made humanity to thrive in various ecological and demographic environments. Solutions to the tasks that humans needed to solve could be mapped onto a task space which could take the form of either…
Agent-based modeling is a paradigm of modeling dynamic systems of interacting agents that are individually governed by specified behavioral rules. Training a model of such agents to produce an emergent behavior by specification of the…
One of the main problems of modern cognitive architectures is an excessively schematic approach to modeling the processes of cognitive activity. It does not allow the creation of a universal architecture that would be capable of reproducing…
This paper proposes that the distinctively human capacity for cumulative, adaptive, open-ended cultural evolution came about through two temporally-distinct cognitive transitions. First, the origin of Homo-specific culture over two MYA was…
A fundamental feature of human intelligence is that we accumulate and transfer knowledge as a society and across generations. We describe here a network architecture for the human brain that may support this feature and suggest that two key…
This paper explains in layperson's terms how an agent-based model was used to investigate the hypothesis that culture evolves more effectively when novelty-generating creative processes are tempered by imitation processes that preserve…
Excess individual creativity can be detrimental to society because creators invest in unproven ideas at the expense of propagating proven ones. Moreover, a proportion of individuals can benefit from creativity without being creative…
The speed and transformative power of human cultural evolution is evident from the change it has wrought on our planet. This chapter proposes a human computation program aimed at (1) distinguishing algorithmic from non-algorithmic…
Culture is not just traits but a dynamic system of interdependent beliefs, practices and artefacts embedded in cognitive, social and material structures. Culture evolves as these entities interact, generating path dependence, attractor…
It has been proposed that cultural evolution was made possible by a cognitive transition brought about by onset of the capacity for self-triggered recall and rehearsal. Here we develop a novel idea that models of collectively autocatalytic…
At the core of our uniquely human cognitive abilities is the capacity to see things from different perspectives, or to place them in a new context. We propose that this was made possible by two cognitive transitions. First, the large brain…
Research in cultural evolution aims at providing causal explanations for the change of culture over time. Over the past decades, this field has generated an important body of knowledge, using experimental, historical, and computational…
Simulation-based theory development has yielded powerful insights into collective performance by linking social structure to emergent outcomes, yet it has struggled to extend to collective creativity. Creativity is hard to capture purely at…
The competitive and cooperative forces of natural selection have driven the evolution of intelligence for millions of years, culminating in nature's vast biodiversity and the complexity of human minds. Inspired by this process, we propose a…
Low-level "adaptive" and higher-level "sophisticated" human reasoning processes have been proposed to play opposing roles in the emergence of unpredictable collective behaviors like crowd panics, traffic jams, and market bubbles. While…
Machine Learning techniques have been used to teach computer programs how to play games as complicated as Chess and Go. These were achieved using powerful tools such as Neural Networks and Parallel Computing on Supercomputers. In this…
Recent computational experiments have demonstrated the spontaneous emergence of self-replicating programs across universal automata, artificial chemistries, and self-modifying code systems. Remarkably, these results arise without explicit…
How do people acquire rich, flexible knowledge about their environment from others despite limited cognitive capacity? Humans are often thought to rely on computationally costly mentalizing, such as inferring others' beliefs. In contrast,…
EVOC (for EVOlution of Culture) is a computer model of culture that enables us to investigate how various factors such as barriers to cultural diffusion, the presence and choice of leaders, or changes in the ratio of innovation to imitation…
Empirical evidence shows that human behaviour often deviates from game-theoretical rationality. For instance, humans may hold unrealistic expectations about future outcomes. As the evolutionary roots of such biases remain unclear, we…