Cultural Evolution with Sparse Testimony: when does the Cultural Ratchet Slip?

Andrew Whalen, Luke Maurits, Michael Pacer, Thomas L. Griffiths

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014
PublisherThe Cognitive Science Society
Pages3101-3106
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9780991196708
StatePublished - 2014
Externally publishedYes
Event36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014 - Quebec City, Canada
Duration: Jul 23 2014Jul 26 2014

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014

Conference

Conference36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityQuebec City
Period7/23/147/26/14

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Cognitive Neuroscience

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