Cognitive prerequisites for cumulative culture are context-dependent: Children’s potential for ratcheting depends on cue longevity

Wilks, Charlotte Elizabeth Holmes; Rafetseder, Eva; Renner, Elizabeth; Atkinson, Mark; Caldwell, Christine A.

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2020.105031

Cited by 9 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 170 publications

(594 reference statements)

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“…In particular, it may be challenging to show adaptive change over historical time in nonhuman species, much less in experimental contexts, because their cultural traditions either lack artifacts (i.e., are behavioral) or show less apparent change. However, although no other species have anything close to our sophisticated technologies, symbolic languages, and institutions, as we present here, more basic forms of cultural improvement may be present across a range of taxa (Wilks et al, 2021). Understanding these will help us understand the evolutionary history of humans’ impressive capacity for cumulative culture.…”

mentioning

confidence: 80%

Leveling the playing field in studying cumulative cultural evolution: Conceptual and methodological advances in nonhuman animal research.

Rawlings¹,

Legare²,

Brosnan³

et al. 2021

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cogniti

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Cumulative cultural evolution (CCE), the improvement of cultural traits over generations via social transmission, is widely believed to be unique to humans. The capacity to build upon others’ knowledge, technologies, and skills has produced the most diverse and sophisticated technological repertoire in the animal kingdom. Yet, inconsistency in both the definitions and criteria used to determine CCE and the methodology used to examine it across studies may be hindering our ability to determine which aspects are unique to humans. Issues regarding how improvement is defined and measured and whether some criteria are empirically testable are of increasing concern to the field. In this article, we critically assess the progress made in the field and current points of debate from conceptual and methodological perspectives. We discuss how inconsistency in definitions is detrimental to our ability to document potential evidence of CCE to nonhuman animals. We build on Mesoudi and Thornton’s (2018) recently described core and extended CCE criteria to make specific recommendations about, from a comparative lens, which criteria should be used as evidence of CCE. We evaluate existing data from both wild and captive studies of nonhuman animals using these suggestions. We finish by discussing issues currently faced by researchers studying CCE in nonhuman animals, particularly nonhuman primates, and provide suggestions that may overcome these concerns and move the field forward.

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mentioning

confidence: 80%

Leveling the playing field in studying cumulative cultural evolution: Conceptual and methodological advances in nonhuman animal research.

Rawlings¹,

Legare²,

Brosnan³

et al. 2021

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cogniti

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“…Being exposed to demonstrations that score higher than would be expected by chance or random exploration is the experimental equivalent of being exposed to a trait or tool that has been modified by a conspecific to be more useful than in its natural state in the environment: for example, exposure to knapped stone tools as opposed to unmodified rocks. This paradigm has been used to test the potential for ratcheting in tufted capuchins [16] and young children [17].…”

Section: Measuring Cumulative Cultural Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Whether PFR relies upon system-2 processes can therefore be investigated by comparing performance in a PFR task with and without access to working memory resources. Wilks et al (2021) [17] found that PFR in young children was evident only when there was no memory requirement to the task. Task interference from memory demands was also found in a search task that required using a simple selective social learning strategy [19].…”

Section: Measuring Emccmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…See Figure 1 for an example of a trial. This task is similar in design to those used with capuchin monkeys [16] and children [17,24]. As this task explicitly labels the useful information that should be copied, the challenge is not simply to identify this information but to apply it efficiently in order to use a selective strategy-something which is often not implemented by the different study populations cited above.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Restricted Access to Working Memory Does Not Prevent Cumulative Score Improvement in a Cultural Evolution Task

Dunstone

Atkinson

Renner

et al. 2022

Entropy

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Some theories propose that human cumulative culture is dependent on explicit, system-2, metacognitive processes. To test this, we investigated whether access to working memory is required for cumulative cultural evolution. We restricted access to adults’ working-memory (WM) via a dual-task paradigm, to assess whether this reduced performance in a cultural evolution task, and a metacognitive monitoring task. In total, 247 participants completed either a grid search task or a metacognitive monitoring task in conjunction with a WM task and a matched control. Participants’ behaviour in the grid search task was then used to simulate the outcome of iterating the task over multiple generations. Participants in the grid search task scored higher after observing higher-scoring examples, but could only beat the scores of low-scoring example trials. Scores did not differ significantly between the control and WM distractor blocks, although more errors were made when under WM load. The simulation showed similar levels of cumulative score improvement across conditions. However, scores plateaued without reaching the maximum. Metacognitive efficiency was low in both blocks, with no indication of dual-task interference. Overall, we found that taxing working-memory resources did not prevent cumulative score improvement on this task, but impeded it slightly relative to a control distractor task. However, we found no evidence that the dual-task manipulation impacted participants’ ability to use explicit metacognition. Although we found minimal evidence in support of the explicit metacognition theory of cumulative culture, our results provide valuable insights into empirical approaches that could be used to further test predictions arising from this account.

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“…(3) The third type, which is the most relevant to the present study, is learning through witnessing failed attempts by others to achieve a certain specific goal. A previous study of the three-armed bandit task (finding treasure by choosing from three options) showed that human children (3–6 years old) could beneficially exploit negative social information (i.e., failure of others) when it is combined with positive social information 35 . Further, an experimental study showed that 3-year-old children were more likely to learn correct tool-use when negative and positive social information were given together than when only positive social information was given; the performance did not significantly increase compared with chance level when only negative social information was given 36 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Negative observational learning might play a limited role in the cultural evolution of technology

Nakawake

Kobayashi

2022

Sci Rep

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Theoretical and empirical studies of the cultural evolution in technology have often focused on positive observational learning, i.e., copying a successful individual. However, negative observational learning, i.e., avoiding negative or bad exemplar behavior, is ubiquitous in humans and other animals. In this paper, we experimentally investigate whether observing negative examples can assist in tool making in the virtual arrowhead task, which has been widely applied to test the theory of cultural evolution in the technological domain. We set three conditions that differ in the kinds of social learning available to participants: (1) positive observational learning, (2) negative observational learning, and (3) pure asocial learning. The results of the positive observational and pure asocial learning conditions replicated previous studies; i.e., participants in the positive observational learning condition outperformed those in the asocial learning condition. In contrast, opportunities to observe negative examples did not increase the performance compared to pure asocial learning. Computer simulations in the same setting showed that the presence of negative exemplars is in theory beneficial to participants, providing additional pieces of information on the relationship between arrowhead designs and their performance scores. These findings together suggest that negative observational learning might play only a limited role in the cultural evolution of technologies possibly due to a cognitive bias in humans toward copying.

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Cognitive prerequisites for cumulative culture are context-dependent: Children’s potential for ratcheting depends on cue longevity

Cited by 9 publications

References 170 publications

Leveling the playing field in studying cumulative cultural evolution: Conceptual and methodological advances in nonhuman animal research.

Leveling the playing field in studying cumulative cultural evolution: Conceptual and methodological advances in nonhuman animal research.

Restricted Access to Working Memory Does Not Prevent Cumulative Score Improvement in a Cultural Evolution Task

Negative observational learning might play a limited role in the cultural evolution of technology

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