Related papers: Human Communication Systems Evolve by Cultural Sel…
Social groups with widely different music tastes, political convictions, and religious beliefs emerge and disappear on scales from extreme subcultures to mainstream mass-cultures. Both the underlying social structure and the formation of…
Non-binding communication is common in daily life and crucial for fostering cooperation, even though it has no direct payoff consequences. However, despite robust empirical evidence, its evolutionary basis remains poorly understood. Here,…
Evolutionary games are a developing sub-field of game theory. This branch of game theory is used in the study of the adaptation of large, but finite, populations of agents to changes in the environment. It assumes that each agent has no…
We study a communication game between a sender and a receiver. The sender chooses one of her signals about the state of the world (i.e., anecdotes) and communicates to the receiver who takes an action affecting both players. The sender and…
Language change is a complex social phenomenon, revealing pathways of communication and sociocultural influence. But, while language change has long been a topic of study in sociolinguistics, traditional linguistic research methods rely on…
We propose communication pattern logic. A communication pattern describes how processes or agents inform each other, independently of the information content. The full-information protocol in distributed computing is the special case…
In recent times, the research field of language dynamics has focused on the investigation of language evolution, dividing the work in three evolutive steps, according to the level of complexity: lexicon, categories and grammar. The Naming…
With the rise of human-machine communication, machines are increasingly designed with humanlike characteristics, such as gender, which can inadvertently trigger cognitive biases. Many conversational agents (CAs), such as voice assistants…
Models of conformity and anti-conformity have typically focused on cultural traits with nominal (unordered) variants, such as baby names, strategies (cooperate/defect), or the presence/absence of an innovation. There have been fewer studies…
In social sciences, there is currently no consensus on the mechanism for cultural evolution. The evolution of first names of newborn babies offers a remarkable example for the researches in the field. Here we perform statistical analyses on…
This article reviews and evaluates models of network evolution based on the notion of structural diversity. We show that diversity is an underlying theme of three principles of network evolution: the preferential attachment model,…
Language is a powerful communicative and cognitive tool. It enables humans to express thoughts, share intentions, and reason about complex phenomena. Despite our fluency in using and understanding language, the question of how it arises and…
We propose a mathematical model for collective sensing in a population growing in a stochastically varying environment. In the population, individuals use an information channel for sensing the environment, and two channels for signal…
Collective adaptive systems are new emerging computational systems consisting of a large number of interacting components and featuring complex behaviour. These systems are usually distributed, heterogeneous, decentralised and…
Why do children learn some words before others? Understanding individual variability across children and also variability across words, may be informative of the learning processes that underlie language learning. We investigated item-based…
Emergent multi-agent communication protocols are very different from natural language and not easily interpretable by humans. We find that agents that were initially pretrained to produce natural language can also experience detrimental…
Although Darwinian models are rampant in the social sciences, social scientists do not face the problem that motivated Darwin's theory of natural selection: the problem of explaining how lineages evolve despite that any traits they acquire…
Opinion dynamics on social networks have been received considerable attentions in recent years. Nevertheless, just a few works have theoretically analyzed the condition in which a certain opinion can spread in the whole structured…
The selection pressures that have shaped the evolution of complex traits in humans remain largely unknown, and in some contexts highly contentious, perhaps above all where they concern mean trait differences among groups. To date, the…
Understanding how cognitive and social mechanisms shape the evolution of complex artifacts such as songs is central to cultural evolution research. Social network topology (what artifacts are available?), selection (which are chosen?), and…