TY - GEN
T1 - Cultural Evolution with Sparse Testimony
T2 - 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014
AU - Whalen, Andrew
AU - Maurits, Luke
AU - Pacer, Michael
AU - Griffiths, Thomas L.
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgments. This work was supported by grant number IIS-1018733 from the National Science Foundation, grant number FA9550-13-1-0170 from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship, and John Templeton Foundation grant #40128, Exploring the Evolutionary Foundations of Cultural Complexity, Creativity and Trust.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014. All rights reserved.
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - Humans have accumulated a wealth of knowledge over the course of many generations, implementing a kind of “cultural ratchet”. Past work has used models and experiments in the iterated learning paradigm to understand how knowledge is acquired and changed over generations. However, this work has assumed that learners receive extremely rich testimony from their teacher: the teacher's entire posterior distribution over possible states of the world. We relax this assumption and show that much sparser testimony may still be sufficient for learners to improve over time, although with limits on the concepts that can be learned. We experimentally demonstrate this result by running an iterated learning experiment based on a classic category learning task.
AB - Humans have accumulated a wealth of knowledge over the course of many generations, implementing a kind of “cultural ratchet”. Past work has used models and experiments in the iterated learning paradigm to understand how knowledge is acquired and changed over generations. However, this work has assumed that learners receive extremely rich testimony from their teacher: the teacher's entire posterior distribution over possible states of the world. We relax this assumption and show that much sparser testimony may still be sufficient for learners to improve over time, although with limits on the concepts that can be learned. We experimentally demonstrate this result by running an iterated learning experiment based on a classic category learning task.
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M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85098431651
T3 - Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014
SP - 3101
EP - 3106
BT - Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014
PB - The Cognitive Science Society
Y2 - 23 July 2014 through 26 July 2014
ER -