Related papers: Shedding light on social learning
Social, supervised, learning from others might amplify individual, possibly unsupervised, learning by individuals, and might underlie the development and evolution of culture. We studied a minimal model of the interaction of individual…
Cumulative cultural evolution occurs when adaptive innovations are passed down to consecutive generations through social learning. This process has shaped human technological innovation, but also occurs in non-human species. While it is…
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…
Human culture is uniquely cumulative and open-ended. Using a computational model of cultural evolution in which neural network based agents evolve ideas for actions through invention and imitation, we tested the hypothesis that this is due…
Immersion in a creative task can be an intimate experience. It can feel like a mystery: intangible, inexplicable, and beyond the reach of science. However, science is making exciting headway into understanding creativity. While the mind of…
We consider the problem of the evolution of a code within a structured population of agents. The agents try to maximise their information about their environment by acquiring information from the outputs of other agents in the population. A…
We study a neuro-inspired model that mimics a discussion (or information dissemination) process in a network of agents. During their interaction, agents redistribute activity and network weights, resulting in emergence of leader(s). The…
In social systems, people communicate with each other and form groups based on their interests. The pattern of interactions, the network, and the ideas that flow on the network naturally evolve together. Researchers use simple models to…
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…
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,…
The iterated learning model is an agent model which simulates the transmission of of language from generation to generation. It is used to study how the language adapts to pressures imposed by transmission. In each iteration, a language…
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…
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…
Artificial Intelligence has looked into biological systems as a source of inspiration. Although there are many aspects of the brain yet to be discovered, neuroscience has found evidence that the connections between neurons continuously grow…
A standard belief on emerging collective behavior is that it emerges from simple individual rules. Most of the mathematical research on such collective behavior starts from imperative individual rules, like always go to the center. But how…
Finding and facilitating commonalities between the linguistic behaviors of large language models and humans could lead to major breakthroughs in our understanding of the acquisition, processing, and evolution of language. However, most…
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…
Although creativity is encouraged in the abstract it is often discouraged in educational and workplace settings. Using an agent-based model of cultural evolution, we investigated the idea that tempering the novelty-generating effects of…
Generative AI has transformed the economics of information production, making explanations, proofs, examples, and analyses available at very low cost. Yet the value of information still depends on whether downstream users can absorb and act…
A local culture denotes a commonly shared behaviour within a cluster of firms. Similar to social norms or conventions, it is an emergent feature resulting from the firms' interaction in an economic network. To model these dynamics, we…