Iterated learning: Intergenerational knowledge transmission reveals inductive biases

Kalish, Michael L.; Griffiths, Thomas L.; Lewandowsky, Stephan

doi:10.3758/bf03194066

Cited by 194 publications

(199 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…Support for the ILM and the role of learner bias in language change has come about in recent years from both iterated learning experiments involving human participants, which have supported much of the work previously done with computational simulation (Kalish et al, 2007;Kirby et al, 2008), and from other methods of research such as the statistical analysis work of Lupyan and Dale (2010), who found that languages that are spoken by larger groups of individuals, such as modern English, tend to have simpler inflectional morphology 2 than those spoken by smaller groups.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 70%

Achieving Compositional Language in a Population of Iterated Learners

Brace

Bullock²,

Noble

2015

07/20/2015-07/24/2015

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Iterated learning takes place when the input into a particular individual's learning process is itself the output of another individual's learning process. This is an important feature to capture when investigating human language change, or the dynamics of culturally learned behaviours in general. Over the last fifteen years, the Iterated Learning Model (ILM) has been used to shed light on how the population-level characteristics of learned communication arise. However, until now each iteration of the model has tended to feature a single immature language user learning from their interactions with a single mature language user. Here, the ILM is extended to include a population of immature and mature language users. We demonstrate that the structure and make-up of this population influences the dynamics of language change that occur over generational time. In particular, we show that, by increasing the number of trainers from which an agent learns, the agent in question learns a fully compositional language at a much faster rate, and with less training data. It is also shown that, so long as the number of mature agents is large enough, this finding holds even if a learner's trainers include other agents that do not yet posses full linguistic competence.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 70%

Achieving Compositional Language in a Population of Iterated Learners

Brace

Bullock²,

Noble

2015

07/20/2015-07/24/2015

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“…Other researchers have developed formal accounts of linguistic and cultural evolution (e.g. Kirby, 2002;Jäger, 2007;Kalish, Griffiths, & Lewandowsky, 2007), and such evolutionary accounts have helped to explain why color categories (Steels & Belpaeme, 2005;Dowman 2007;Komarova, Jameson, & Narens, 2007;Xu, Dowman, & Griffiths, 2013) and kinship categories (Epling, Kirk, & Boyd, 1973;Jordan, 2011) take the forms that they do. A natural direction for future work is to integrate our account with such an evolutionary perspective.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Word Meanings across Languages Support Efficient Communication

Regier

Kemp

Kay

2015

The Handbook of Language Emergence

138

133

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“…The results of these studies largely supported Bartlett's original findings of increasing generalization and assimilation to pre-existing knowledge. Although the later twentieth century saw a decline in the popularity of the transmission chain method, several recent studies have sought to reintroduce the method as a means of studying cultural change, and have updated the transmission chain method to conform to modern standards of experimental psychology (Bangerter 2000;Kashima 2000;Barrett & Nyhof 2001;Mesoudi et al 2006a;Kalish et al 2007;see Mesoudi 2007). These recent studies, too, support Bartlett's (1932) conclusions.…”

Section: The Linear Transmission Chain Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The multiple roles of cultural transmission experiments in understanding human cultural evolution

Mesoudi

Whiten

2008

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

342

258

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In this paper, we explore how experimental studies of cultural transmission in adult humans can address general questions regarding the 'who, what, when and how' of human cultural transmission, and consequently inform a theory of human cultural evolution. Three methods are discussed. The transmission chain method, in which information is passed along linear chains of participants, has been used to identify content biases in cultural transmission. These concern the kind of information that is transmitted. Several such candidate content biases have now emerged from the experimental literature. The replacement method, in which participants in groups are gradually replaced or moved across groups, has been used to study phenomena such as cumulative cultural evolution, cultural group selection and cultural innovation. The closed-group method, in which participants learn in groups with no replacement, has been used to explore issues such as who people choose to learn from and when they learn culturally as opposed to individually. A number of the studies reviewed here have received relatively little attention within their own disciplines, but we suggest that these, and future experimental studies of cultural transmission that build on them, can play an important role in a broader science of cultural evolution.

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Iterated learning: Intergenerational knowledge transmission reveals inductive biases

Cited by 194 publications

References 31 publications

Achieving Compositional Language in a Population of Iterated Learners

Achieving Compositional Language in a Population of Iterated Learners

Word Meanings across Languages Support Efficient Communication

The multiple roles of cultural transmission experiments in understanding human cultural evolution

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