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Cultural evolution allows ideas and technologies to accumulate across generations, reaching their most complex and open-ended form in humans. While social learning enables the transmission of such innovations, the cognitive processes that…
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…
There are both benefits and drawbacks to cultural diversity. It can lead to friction and exacerbate differences. However, as with biological diversity, cultural diversity is valuable in times of upheaval; if a previously effective solution…
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…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
Cultural accumulation drives the open-ended and diverse progress in capabilities spanning human history. It builds an expanding body of knowledge and skills by combining individual exploration with inter-generational information…
There are both benefits and drawbacks to creativity. In a social group it is not necessary for all members to be creative to benefit from creativity; some merely imitate or enjoy the fruits of others' creative efforts. What proportion…
In this paper three computational models for the study of the evolution of cooperation under cultural propagation are studied: Kin Selection, Direct Reciprocity and Indirect Reciprocity. Two analyzes are reported, one comparing their…
This paper investigates the effectiveness of creative versus uncreative leadership using EVOC, an agent-based model of cultural evolution. Each iteration, each agent in the artificial society invents a new action, or imitates a neighbor's…
Feature interaction selection is a fundamental problem in commercial recommender systems. Most approaches equally enumerate all features and interactions by the same pre-defined operation under expert guidance. Their recommendation is…
This paper outlines the implications of neural-level accounts of insight, and models of the conceptual interactions that underlie creativity, for a theory of cultural evolution. Since elements of human culture exhibit cumulative, adaptive,…
This paper presents a speculative model of the cognitive mechanisms underlying the transition from episodic to mimetic (or memetic) culture with the arrival of Homo erectus, which Donald [1991] claims paved the way for the unique features…
Evolution gave rise to human and animal intelligence here on Earth. We argue that the path to developing artificial human-like-intelligence will pass through mimicking the evolutionary process in a nature-like simulation. In Nature, there…
This paper proposes a theory of creativity, referred to as honing theory, which posits that creativity fuels the process by which culture evolves through communal exchange amongst minds that are self-organizing, self-maintaining, and…
Many elements of culture made their first appearance in the Upper Paleolithic. Previous hypotheses put forth to explain this unprecedented burst of creativity are found wanting. Examination of the psychological basis of creativity leads to…
Culture evolves following a process that is akin to biological evolution, although with some significant differences. At the same time culture has often a collective good value for human groups. This paper studies culture in an evolutionary…
There is cognitive, neurological, and computational support for the hypothesis that defocusing attention results in divergent or associative thought, conducive to insight and finding unusual connections, while focusing attention results in…
Dual process models of cognition suggest there are two kinds of thought: rapid, automatic Type 1 processes, and effortful, controlled Type 2 processes. Models of creative thinking also distinguish between two sets of processes: those…
Most research on adaptive decision-making takes a strategy-first approach, proposing a method of solving a problem and then examining whether it can be implemented in the brain and in what environments it succeeds. We present a method for…
In real-world systems, phase transitions often materialize abruptly, making it difficult to design appropriate controls that help uncover underlying processes. Some agent-based computational models display transformations similar to phase…