Beyond social learning

The technical-reasoning network is recruited when people observe others make or teach how to make tools: An fMRI study

Cumulative technological culture is defined as the increase in efficiency and complexity of tools over generations. The role of social cognitive skills in cultural transmission has been long acknowledged. However, recent accounts emphasized the importance of non-social cognitive skills during the social transmission of technical content with a focus on technical reasoning. Here, we contribute to this double process approach by reporting an fMRI study about the neurocognitive origins of social learning. Participants watched videos depicting tool-making episodes in three social-learning conditions: reverse engineering, observation, and teaching. Our results showed that the technical-reasoning network, centered around the area PF of the left inferior parietal cortex, was preferentially activated when watching tool-making episodes. Additionally, teaching elicited the right middle temporal gyrus. This study suggests that technical reasoning underpins technological culture, while social cognition enhances learners' technical reasoning by guiding attention to key aspects of the technology.

The cognitive and evolutionary science of behavioural modernity goes beyond material chronology

Stibbard-Hawkes' taphonomic findings are valuable, and his call for caution warranted, but the hazards he raises are being mitigated by a multi-pronged approach; current research on behavioural/cognitive modernity is not based solely on material chronology. Theories synthesize data from archaeology, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, and genetics, and predictions arising from these theories are tested with mathematical and agent-based models.

Integrating social learning and network formation for social tipping towards a sustainable future

Numerous psychological biases shape how we respond to observing others conforming to or diverging from social norms. Depending on our social networks, we may be more influenced by societal majorities, such as the widespread consumption of meat or frequent air travel, or by the sustainable lifestyles of our closest friends. The evolution of social norms is shaped by personal preferences, values, beliefs, and the structure of social networks. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for promoting a cultural shift towards sustainability, yet our grasp of how normative transformations occur remains limited. In this paper, we simulate an agent-based model in which agents choose between maintaining the status quo or adopting an alternative, engaging in a coordination game. Our model illustrates that interventions aimed at changing individual preferences may fail if the population is structured in polarised networks, where agents with similar preferences cluster together and primarily interact within their groups. These echo chambers limit the effectiveness of preference-based interventions. However, we show that a subsequent intervention that increases the salience of behaviours from agents with dissimilar preferences can successfully tip the population from a status quo equilibrium to an alternative norm equilibrium. This paper outlines the challenges policymakers face in designing interventions for catalysing positive social norm changes. We argue for a reevaluation of current methodologies for modelling and empirically investigating norm change. Our primary recommendation for future research is a more comprehensive incorporation of the myriad ways individuals respond to social information and network formation.

Is Culture Learned? The Neglected Role of Evoking Events

Although no one disputes that the transmission of culture depends on social learning, a capacity that has enabled humans, unlike other animals, to modify cultural practices across generations, this review argues that cultural change can also be evoked by environmental events leading to an alteration in the configuration of an habitual behavioural repertoire. An evoked mechanism allows latent or normally suppressed behaviour to emerge. Cannibalism and warfare are put forward as examples. Evoked mechanisms have largely been ignored by one of the few attempts to reconcile biology and culture, namely cumulative cultural evolution (CCE). This review endorses CCE's aim of developing a biocultural conceptual framework but criticises this model for failing to produce a credible analysis of culture into 'units' or 'variants'. The critique of CCE is situated within a discussion of the long-standing separation within academia of science and arts disciplines, each focusing at different levels of analysis and with different aims. It is suggested that the main obstacle to developing a biocultural framework can be attributed to an incompatibility between nomothetic and idiographic research methods, the former being typical of the biological sciences, the latter of the arts. A successful biocultural conceptual framework would therefore have to accommodate the particular and the general. It is suggested that progress in this direction would be made if agreement could be reached on ways of observing or inferring behaviours rather than pursuing an analysis in terms of hypothetical constructs such as mental representations or units of 'cultural information'.

Bumblebee social learning outcomes correlate with their flower-facing behaviour

Previous studies suggest that social learning in bumblebees can occur through second-order conditioning, with conspecifics functioning as first-order reinforcers. However, the behavioural mechanisms underlying bumblebees' acquisition of socially learned associations remain largely unexplored. Investigating these mechanisms requires detailed quantification and analysis of the observation process. Here we designed a new 2D paradigm suitable for simple top-down high-speed video recording and analysed bumblebees' observational learning process using a deep-learning-based pose-estimation framework. Two groups of bumblebees observed live conspecifics foraging from either blue or yellow flowers during a single foraging bout, and were subsequently tested for their socially learned colour preferences. Both groups successfully learned the colour indicated by the demonstrators and spent more time facing rewarding flowers-whether occupied by demonstrators or not-compared to non-rewarding flowers. While both groups showed a negative correlation between time spent facing non-rewarding flowers and learning outcomes, the observer bees in the blue group benefited from time spent facing occupied rewarding flowers, whereas the yellow group showed that time facing unoccupied rewarding flowers by the observer bees positively correlated with their learning outcomes. These results suggest that socially influenced colour preferences are shaped by the interplay of different types of observations rather than merely by observing a conspecific at a single colour. Together, these findings provide direct evidence of the dynamical viewing process of observer bees during social observation, opening up new opportunities for exploring the details of more complex social learning in bumblebees and other insects.

Cultural evolution: A review of theoretical challenges

The rapid growth of cultural evolutionary science, its expansion into numerous fields, its use of diverse methods, and several conceptual problems have outpaced corollary developments in theory and philosophy of science. This has led to concern, exemplified in results from a recent survey conducted with members of the Cultural Evolution Society, that the field lacks 'knowledge synthesis', is poorly supported by 'theory', has an ambiguous relation to biological evolution and uses key terms (e.g. 'culture', 'social learning', 'cumulative culture') in ways that hamper operationalization in models, experiments and field studies. Although numerous review papers in the field represent and categorize its empirical findings, the field's theoretical challenges receive less critical attention even though challenges of a theoretical or conceptual nature underlie most of the problems identified by Cultural Evolution Society members. Guided by the heterogeneous 'grand challenges' emergent in this survey, this paper restates those challenges and adopts an organizational style requisite to discussion of them. The paper's goal is to contribute to increasing conceptual clarity and theoretical discernment around the most pressing challenges facing the field of cultural evolutionary science. It will be of most interest to cultural evolutionary scientists, theoreticians, philosophers of science and interdisciplinary researchers.

Subjective selection and the evolution of complex culture

Why is culture the way it is? Here I argue that a major force shaping culture is subjective (cultural) selection, or the selective retention of cultural variants that people subjectively perceive as satisfying their goals. I show that people evaluate behaviors and beliefs according to how useful they are, especially for achieving goals. As they adopt and pass on those variants that seem best, they iteratively craft culture into increasingly effective-seeming forms. I argue that this process drives the development of many cumulatively complex cultural products, including effective technology, magic and ritual, aesthetic traditions, and institutions. I show that it can explain cultural dependencies, such as how certain beliefs create corresponding new practices, and I outline how it interacts with other cultural evolutionary processes. Cultural practices everywhere, from spears to shamanism, develop because people subjectively evaluate them to be effective means of satisfying regular goals.

Blind alleys and fruitful pathways in the comparative study of cultural cognition

A mere few decades ago, culture was thought a unique human attribute. Evidence to the contrary accumulated through the latter part of the twentieth century and has exploded in the present one, demonstrating the transmission of traditions through social learning across all principal vertebrate taxa and even invertebrates, notably insects. The scope of human culture is nevertheless highly distinctive. What makes our cultural capacities and their cognitive underpinnings so different? In this article I argue that in behavioural scientists' endeavours to answer this question, fruitful research pathways and their ensuing discoveries have come to exist alongside popular, yet in the light of current empirical evidence, highly questionable scenarios and even scientific blind alleys. I particularly re-evaluate theories that rely on the centrality of a supposed uniquely human capacity for imitative copying in explaining the distinctive capacity for massive cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) in our species. The most extreme versions of this perspective suffer logical incoherence and severe limits on scientific testability. By contrast the field has generated a range of rigorous observational and experimental methodologies that have revealed both long-term cultural fidelity and limited forms of CCE in non-human species. Attention now turns to directly investigating the scope, limits and underlying cognition of non-human versus human CCE, with a broader approach to factors additional to cultural transmission, notably the role of invention, innovation and evolved motivational biases underlying the scope of CCE in the species studied.

Biological adaptations for cultural transmission?

According to several interlinked and influential lines of argument, human minds have been shaped by natural selection so as to include biological adaptations with the evolved, naturally selected function to facilitate the transmission of cultural knowledge. This 'cultural minds' hypothesis has proved highly influential, and if it is correct it is a major step forward in understanding how and why humans have survived and prospered in a hugely diverse range of ecologies. It can be contrasted with a 'social minds' hypothesis, according to which cultural transmission occurs as an outcome, but not the biologically evolved function, of social cognition the domain of which is relatively small-group interaction. Here, I critique the cultural minds hypothesis and I argue that the data favour the social minds perspective. Cultural phenomena can clearly emerge and persist over time without cognitive adaptations for cultural transmission. Overtly intentional communication plays an especially pivotal role.

What Makes Inventions Become Traditions?

Although anthropology was the first academic discipline to investigate cultural change, many other disciplines have made noteworthy contributions to understanding what influences the adoption of new behaviors. Drawing on a broad, interdisciplinary literature covering both humans and nonhumans, we examine ( a) which features of behavioral traits make them more transmissible, ( b) which individual characteristics of inventors promote copying of their inventions, ( c) which characteristics of individuals make them more prone to adopting new behaviors, ( d) which characteristics of dyadic relationships promote cultural transmission, ( e) which properties of groups (e.g., network structures) promote transmission of traits, and ( f) which characteristics of groups promote retention, rather than extinction, of cultural traits. One of anthropology's strengths is its readiness to adopt and improve theories and methods from other disciplines, integrating them into a more holistic approach; hence, we identify approaches that might be particularly useful to biological and cultural anthropologists, and knowledge gaps that should be filled.

Human cumulative culture and the exploitation of natural phenomena

Cumulative cultural evolution (CCE)-defined as the process by which beneficial modifications are culturally transmitted and progressively accumulated over time-has long been argued to underlie the unparalleled diversity and complexity of human culture. In this paper, I argue that not just any kind of cultural accumulation will give rise to human-like culture. Rather, I suggest that human CCE depends on the gradual exploitation of natural phenomena, which are features of our environment that, through the laws of physics, chemistry or biology, generate reliable effects which can be exploited for a purpose. I argue that CCE comprises two distinct processes: optimizing cultural traits that exploit a given set of natural phenomena (Type I CCE) and expanding the set of natural phenomena we exploit (Type II CCE). I argue that the most critical features of human CCE, including its open-ended dynamic, stems from Type II CCE. Throughout the paper, I contrast the two processes and discuss their respective socio-cognitive requirements. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines'.

Expression unleashed: The evolutionary and cognitive foundations of human communication

Human expression is open-ended, versatile, and diverse, ranging from ordinary language use to painting, from exaggerated displays of affection to micro-movements that aid coordination. Here we present and defend the claim that this expressive diversity is united by an interrelated suite of cognitive capacities, the evolved functions of which are the expression and recognition of informative intentions. We describe how evolutionary dynamics normally leash communication to narrow domains of statistical mutual benefit, and how expression is unleashed in humans. The relevant cognitive capacities are cognitive adaptations to living in a partner choice social ecology; and they are, correspondingly, part of the ordinarily developing human cognitive phenotype, emerging early and reliably in ontogeny. In other words, we identify distinctive features of our species' social ecology to explain how and why humans, and only humans, evolved the cognitive capacities that, in turn, lead to massive diversity and open-endedness in means and modes of expression. Language use is but one of these modes of expression, albeit one of manifestly high importance. We make cross-species comparisons, describe how the relevant cognitive capacities can evolve in a gradual manner, and survey how unleashed expression facilitates not only language use, but also novel behaviour in many other domains too, focusing on the examples of joint action, teaching, punishment, and art, all of which are ubiquitous in human societies but relatively rare in other species. Much of this diversity derives from graded aspects of human expression, which can be used to satisfy informative intentions in creative and new ways. We aim to help reorient cognitive pragmatics, as a phenomenon that is not a supplement to linguistic communication and on the periphery of language science, but rather the foundation of the many of the most distinctive features of human behaviour, society, and culture.

A preference to learn from successful rather than common behaviours in human social dilemmas

Human cooperation is often claimed to be special and requiring explanations based on gene-culture coevolution favouring a desire to copy common social behaviours. If this is true, then individuals should be motivated to both observe and copy common social behaviours. Previous economic experiments, using the public goods game, have suggested individuals' desire to sacrifice for the common good and to copy common social behaviours. However, previous experiments have often not shown examples of success. Here we test, on 489 participants, whether individuals are more motivated to learn about, and more likely to copy, either common or successful behaviours. Using the same social dilemma and standard instructions, we find that individuals were primarily motivated to learn from successful rather than common behaviours. Consequently, social learning disfavoured costly cooperation, even when individuals could observe a stable, pro-social level of cooperation. Our results call into question explanations for human cooperation based on cultural evolution and/or a desire to conform with common social behaviours. Instead, our results indicate that participants were motivated by personal gain, but initially confused, despite receiving standard instructions. When individuals could learn from success, they learned to cooperate less, suggesting that human cooperation is maybe not so special after all.

Social information use and social information waste

Social information is immensely valuable. Yet we waste it. The information we get from observing other humans and from communicating with them is a cheap and reliable informational resource. It is considered the backbone of human cultural evolution. Theories and models focused on the evolution of social learning show the great adaptive benefits of evolving cognitive tools to process it. In spite of this, human adults in the experimental literature use social information quite inefficiently: they do not take it sufficiently into account. A comprehensive review of the literature on five experimental tasks documented 45 studies showing social information waste, and four studies showing social information being over-used. These studies cover 'egocentric discounting' phenomena as studied by social psychology, but also include experimental social learning studies. Social information waste means that human adults fail to give social information its optimal weight. Both proximal explanations and accounts derived from evolutionary theory leave crucial aspects of the phenomenon unaccounted for: egocentric discounting is a pervasive effect that no single unifying explanation fully captures. Cultural evolutionary theory's insistence on the power and benefits of social influence is to be balanced against this phenomenon. This article is part of the theme issue 'Foundations of cultural evolution'.