Related papers: Cultural Evolution of Categorization
Categories such as animal or furniture are acquired at an early age and play an important role in processing, organizing, and communicating world knowledge. Categories exist across cultures: they allow to efficiently represent the…
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…
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…
Categories provide a coarse grained description of the world. A fundamental question is whether categories simply mirror an underlying structure of nature, or instead come from the complex interactions of human beings among themselves and…
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,…
In designing an intelligent system that must be able to explain its reasoning to a human user, or to provide generalizations that the human user finds reasonable, it may be useful to take into consideration psychological data on what types…
Formal modelling provides a toolkit for understanding cultural dynamics, from individual decisions to recurring patterns of change. This chapter explains what models are and why they matter. Using a precise, shared language, they aid…
It has been proposed that, since the origin of life and the ensuing evolution of biological species, a second evolutionary process has appeared on our planet. It is the evolution of culture-e.g., ideas, beliefs, and artifacts. Does culture…
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…
Categorization, a core cognitive ability in humans that organizes objects based on common features, is essential to cognitive science as well as computer vision. To evaluate the categorization ability of visual AI models, various proxy…
The evolution of cognition is frequently discussed as the evolution of cognitive abilities or the evolution of some neuronal structures in the brain. However, since such traits or abilities are often highly complex, understanding their…
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…
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…
The ability of humans to create and disseminate culture is often credited as the single most important factor of our success as a species. In this Perspective, we explore the notion of machine culture, culture mediated or generated by…
Culture evolves, not just in the trivial sense that cultures change over time, but also in the strong sense that such change is governed by Darwinian principles. Both biological and cultural evolution are essentially cumulative selection…
The commentators have brought a wealth of new perspectives to the question of how culture evolves. Each of their diverse disciplines--ranging from psychology to biology to anthropology to economics to engineering--has a valuable…
Programming languages are engineered languages that allow to instruct a machine and share algorithmic information; they have a great influence on the society since they underlie almost every information technology artefact, and they are at…
We present a theory of cultural evolution based upon a renormalization group scheme. We consider rational but cognitively limited agents who optimize their decision making process by iteratively updating and refining the mental…
Human categorization is one of the most important and successful targets of cognitive modeling in psychology, yet decades of development and assessment of competing models have been contingent on small sets of simple, artificial…
Human communication systems, such as language, evolve culturally; their components undergo reproduction and variation. However, a role for selection in cultural evolutionary dynamics is less clear. Often neutral evolution (also known as…