TY - GEN
T1 - Inductive Biases Constrain Cumulative Cultural Evolution
AU - Thompson, Bill
AU - Griffiths, Thomas L.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was funded in part by NSF grant 1456709 and DARPA Cooperative Agreement D17AC00004.
Publisher Copyright:
© Cognitive Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019.All rights reserved.
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - Cumulative cultural evolution is a distinctively human form of information-processing that endows our societies with improbable and efficient technologies. But how objective is this process? A widely held conjecture is that human cognitive biases can constrain cumulative cultural evolution, and therefore shape our discoveries. We present a Bayesian analysis of a simple form of cumulative cultural evolution. This model allows us to formulate and test the theoretical conjecture in an experimental setting. Across a series of behavioural experiments, we show that people's inductive biases constrain a population's ability to discover counter-intuitive virtual technologies in a simple search problem. Our analysis highlights formal relationships between cumulative cultural evolution, Bayesian inference, and stochastic optimization.
AB - Cumulative cultural evolution is a distinctively human form of information-processing that endows our societies with improbable and efficient technologies. But how objective is this process? A widely held conjecture is that human cognitive biases can constrain cumulative cultural evolution, and therefore shape our discoveries. We present a Bayesian analysis of a simple form of cumulative cultural evolution. This model allows us to formulate and test the theoretical conjecture in an experimental setting. Across a series of behavioural experiments, we show that people's inductive biases constrain a population's ability to discover counter-intuitive virtual technologies in a simple search problem. Our analysis highlights formal relationships between cumulative cultural evolution, Bayesian inference, and stochastic optimization.
KW - Bayes
KW - computation
KW - cultural evolution
KW - cumulative cultural evolution
KW - inductive biases
KW - optimization
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M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85102878251
T3 - Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019
SP - 1111
EP - 1117
BT - Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
PB - The Cognitive Science Society
T2 - 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019
Y2 - 24 July 2019 through 27 July 2019
ER -