Cumulative cultural learning: Development and diversity

124

It is widely recognized that language plays a key role in the transmission of human culture, but relatively little is known about the mechanisms by which language simultaneously encourages both cultural stability and cultural innovation. This paper examines this issue by focusing on the use of language to transmit categories, focusing on two universal devices: labels (e.g., shark, woman) and generics (e.g., "sharks attack swimmers"; "women are nurturing"). We propose that labels and generics each assume two key principles: norms and essentialism. The normative assumption permits transmission of category information with great fidelity, whereas essentialism invites innovation by means of an open-ended, placeholder structure. Additionally, we sketch out how labels and generics aid in conceptual alignment and the progressive "looping" between categories and cultural practices. In this way, human language is a technology that enhances and expands the categorization capacities that we share with other animals.language | categories | essentialism | norms | children

Section: Categories As Cultural Inheritancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…A social norm is a shared, socially constructed, context-specific rule that indicates what is (or is not) socially appropriate (21,47). Labels are fundamentally normative in that they are conventional (i.e., shared with other members of the speech community, a principle required for their successful use) (48,49).…”

Section: Two Presuppositions: Norms and Essencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

How language shapes the cultural inheritance of categories

Gelman

Roberts

2017

124

“…7). Such a statement is obviously true for our own species (8)(9)(10)(11); here I examine the justifications for thinking the phrase also has validity for great apes.…”

mentioning

confidence: 97%

Culture extends the scope of evolutionary biology in the great apes

Whiten

2017

Discoveries about the cultures and cultural capacities of the great apes have played a leading role in the recognition emerging in recent decades that cultural inheritance can be a significant factor in the lives not only of humans but also of nonhuman animals. This prominence derives in part from these primates being those with whom we share the most recent common ancestry, thus offering clues to the origins of our own thoroughgoing reliance on cumulative cultural achievements. In addition, the intense research focus on these species has spawned an unprecedented diversity of complementary methodological approaches, the results of which suggest that cultural phenomena pervade the lives of these apes, with potentially major implications for their broader evolutionary biology. Here I review what this extremely broad array of observational and experimental methodologies has taught us about the cultural lives of chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans and consider the ways in which this knowledge extends our wider understanding of primate biology and the processes of adaptation and evolution that shape it. I address these issues first by evaluating the extent to which the results of cultural inheritance echo a suite of core principles that underlie organic Darwinian evolution but also extend them in new ways and then by assessing the principal causal interactions between the primary, genetically based organic processes of evolution and the secondary system of cultural inheritance that is based on social learning from others.social learning | culture | evolutionary biology | chimpanzee | orangutan R ecent decades have revealed social learning (learning from others) to be pervasive across the animal kingdom, with important implications for evolutionary biology at large (1) and the subject of the Sackler Colloquium published here (2). This article focuses on great apes: chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), and orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus). Other primates are dealt with elsewhere in the issue (3, 4). Despite an early report (5), we still know little about cultural phenomena in chimpanzees' rarer sister species, the bonobo (Pan paniscus) so bonobos are omitted here. I also make only limited reference to human culture, although we are technically also great apes. Human culture is extensively treated in other papers in this issue.

“…Human preschoolers are sensitive to information about physical events and actor's intentions in deciding how faithfully to imitate, and there are also developmental and cultural differences in how imitation takes place (48)(49)(50)(51)(52). Learners of all ages may use their existing causal and cultural knowledge to interpret the actions of another person and to decide whether and how faithfully to imitate those actions.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Changes in cognitive flexibility and hypothesis search across human life history from childhood to adolescence to adulthood

Gopnik

O’Grady

Lucas

et al. 2017

261

216

How was the evolution of our unique biological life history related to distinctive human developments in cognition and culture? We suggest that the extended human childhood and adolescence allows a balance between exploration and exploitation, between wider and narrower hypothesis search, and between innovation and imitation in cultural learning. In particular, different developmental periods may be associated with different learning strategies. This relation between biology and culture was probably coevolutionary and bidirectional: life-history changes allowed changes in learning, which in turn both allowed and rewarded extended life histories. In two studies, we test how easily people learn an unusual physical or social causal relation from a pattern of evidence. We track the development of this ability from early childhood through adolescence and adulthood. In the physical domain, preschoolers, counterintuitively, perform better than school-aged children, who in turn perform better than adolescents and adults. As they grow older learners are less flexible: they are less likely to adopt an initially unfamiliar hypothesis that is consistent with new evidence. Instead, learners prefer a familiar hypothesis that is less consistent with the evidence. In the social domain, both preschoolers and adolescents are actually the most flexible learners, adopting an unusual hypothesis more easily than either 6-y-olds or adults. There may be important developmental transitions in flexibility at the entry into middle childhood and in adolescence, which differ across domains.causal reasoning | social cognition | cognitive development | adolescence | life history O ne of the most distinctive biological features of human beings is our unusual life history. Compared with our closest primate relatives, we have a dramatically extended childhood, including an exceptionally long middle childhood and adolescence. Moreover, humans have shorter interbirth intervals than our closest primate relatives, producing an even greater number of less-capable children (1). There is evidence for other human adaptations that helped cope with this flood of needy young. In contrast to our closest primate relatives, human children enjoy the benefits of care from three sources in addition to biological mothers: pair-bonded fathers (2), alloparents (3), and postmenopausal women, in particular, grandmothers (4).It may seem evolutionarily paradoxical that humans would have developed a life history that includes such expensive and vulnerable young for such a long period. However, across many different species, including birds and both placental and marsupial mammals, there is a very general (although not perfect) correlation between relative brain size, intelligence and a reliance on learning, and an extended period of immaturity (5-7). This correlation suggests a relation between our distinctive human life history and our equally distinctive large brains and reliance on learning, particularly cultural learning. Such a relation between biology and culture ...