Abstract:

Existing models of cumulative cultural evolution suggest that cultural complexity is facilitated by high-fidelity cultural transmission and demographic factors, such as population size. However, models and theory tend to neglect the role of asocial learning in the evolution of cumulative culture, unrealistically treating brains as passive receptacles of socially learned information that increase linearly in size and storage capacity as culture accumulates. Here we address this omission by combining artificial neural network simulations and agent-based models to provide a bottom-up mechanistic understanding of the computational capabilities that neural architectures acquire as they increase in size and alter in morphology. Our more realistic model of brain-culture coevolution generates a biologically feasible nonlinear relationship between brain size, neocortical modularity, and cultural cognition, resembling observed neurological differences between human and nonhuman primates. At optimal network modularity and over a critical size threshold, associative learning and inference give way to new capacities for recursive analogy parsing, generation of arbitrary symbolic associations, and an ability to recall and recombine ideas from uncorrelated domains of cultural knowledge without external cues. Including this within existing models of cumulative culture demonstrates that increasing cultural complexity depends upon recursive imagination, transmission fidelity and demography in equal measure.

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Twitter: @AseSergiou