Japan

We review and discuss the role of collaboration in cultural transmission experiments. Collaboration (or collaborative learning) is considered an important variable in human cultural evolution. However, we argue that this is an aspect often underestimated in experimental studies of cultural transmission. We conducted a critical review of cultural transmission experiments to assess whether collaboration takes place, and whether it is a variable of interest in those studies. We found that collaboration is seldom investigated in those studies. We discuss reasons for this and potential future avenues for research.

Cultural Evolution Society 2021

The role of collaboration in cultural transmission experiments

### Conference Welcome

Welcome to the third Cultural Evolution Society Conference, CES2021. In the conference, which will be held from June 9-11, 2021, about 180 researchers from East Asia, Oceania, Middle East, Europe, North and South America give presentations on their latest research advancing the evolutionary understanding of human and nonhuman animal culture.

### Schedule and Program

[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/1ef06ffd05f80957b4a5b685f63ee3ba.png)](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/fullprogram.pdf)
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### Code of conduct

See the full details of [the code of conduct](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/code-of-conduct/).
&nbsp; 
 CES is dedicated to providing a welcoming and harassment-free conference experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, religion, nationality, or the presence of or care for dependents. 
We do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form. Conference participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the conference at the discretion of the conference organizers.

&nbsp;
**Harassment can occur in-person or virtually, and includes, but is not limited to:**
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&nbsp;
 **Inclusiveness Committee**:
&nbsp;
 To facilitate implementing the code of conduct and foster a climate of inclusion, we have developed an inclusiveness committee. Below is their contact information:
 **Hiromi Matsumae**:	matsumae.hiromi.g@tokai.ac.jp
 **Patrick Savage**:	psavage@sfc.keio.ac.jp
 **Sarah Mathew**:	Sarah.Mathew@asu.edu
 **Gmail:** inclusivenessCES2021@gmail.com
 See [more details about reporting the harassment.](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/code-of-conduct/)

### Organizing committee

**Honorary Conference Organizer:** [Kenichi Aoki (Meiji University)](https://sites.google.com/site/kenichi1aoki/home) 

**Chair:** [Masanori Takezawa (Hokkaido University)](https://lalalarakko.github.io)

**Scientific Committee:** [Kenichi Aoki (Meiji University)](https://sites.google.com/site/kenichi1aoki/home), [Yasuo Ihara (the University of Tokyo)](https://researchmap.jp/read0209180?lang=en), [Hiromi Matsumae (Tokai University)](https://sites.google.com/site/hiromimatsumae/eng), [Naoko Matsumoto (Okayama University)](https://researchmap.jp/nmatsumoto_okayama-u), [Masako Myowa (Kyoto University)](https://myowa.educ.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en), [Hisashi Nakao (Nanzan University)](https://www.hisashinakao.com/), [Patrick E. Savage (Keio University)](https://sites.google.com/view/comp-music-lab/home)

**Local Organizing Committee:** [Yutaka Horita (Teikyo University)](https://sites.google.com/site/yhoritapage/), [Masanori Takezawa (Hokkaido University)](https://lalalarakko.github.io/), [Ayaka Takimoto (Hokkaido University)](https://lynx.let.hokudai.ac.jp/~takimoto/), [Kohei Tamura (Tohoku University)](https://researchmap.jp/7000017854)

**Inclusiveness Committee:** [Sarah Mathew (Arizona State University)](https://www.sarahmathew.net/), [Hiromi Matsumae (Tokai University)](https://sites.google.com/site/hiromimatsumae/eng), [Patrick E. Savage (Keio University)](https://sites.google.com/view/comp-music-lab/home)


![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/967110a00d200a6b20d6f4fa6556ba13.png)

For attending the conference, you first need to register and pay fees from [the link here](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/registration/). After the payment of the registration fees, you will receive a ticket, which is necessary for accessing the conference site. After the payment of the registration fees, you will receive a ticket, which is necessary for accessing the conference site

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poster

Social learning in primates has been studied experimentally for over 120 years, yet until recently these efforts focused only on what one individual would learn from a single other. Evidence of group-wide traditions in the wild stimulated a shift in the present century to recognize the collective context of social learning, with the development of broader ‘diffusion experiments’ that have illuminated the nature and limits of transmission across communities of multiple individuals and then between them. Here we describe the results of two strands within our recent experiments that further explore the collective dimensions of culture and cumulative culture in chimpanzees. The first concerns collective innovation and cumulative culture. Exposing small communities of chimpanzees to contexts incorporating increasingly challenging, but more rewarding, tool use opportunities revealed solutions arising through the combination of different individuals’ discoveries, that spread to become shared innovations. The second strand is conformity, where experiments have yielded evidence of conformist changes from habitual techniques to alternatives displayed by a unanimous majority of others, but with a curious twist akin to quorum decision making, based on only a sample of those in the community. We discuss the implications of this array of findings in the context of related studies of both other primates and non-primate species, as well as for enhancing our understanding of the extraordinary forms that cumulative culture has taken in our own species, likely built on the foundations we can infer from studies of the primates with whom we share our most recent common ancestry.

Collective Knowledge and the Dynamics of Culture in Chimpanzees

Basic vocabulary lists are a popular data type in the field of phylogenetic linguistics because of the vertical signal the data carries. Interestingly, basic vocabulary also features borrowings. The horizontal influence can be understood as a proxy for population contacts as well because loanwords into basic vocabulary are most likely acquired in intimate contact situations. This is valuable information for multidisciplinary studies aiming to integrate information on contact events from various sciences to gain a better insight into the prehistory of a population. As basic vocabulary lists are widely available, they can inform of the known contact history for large groups of languages or even whole language families making wide-scale comparison possible.

We call the contact history of a language reflected by its loanwords the borrowing profile. In our paper, we compare the borrowing profiles mediated by the basic vocabulary of six well-studied Uralic languages to the borrowing profiles of the whole languages represented by large vocabulary stocks. We show that basic vocabulary provides an informative snapshot of the borrowing profile; however, the trace of prehistoric loanword layers is emphasized in basic vocabulary. Known sociolinguistic circumstances explain the differences in the borrowing profiles of basic and whole vocabulary.

Loanwords in basic vocabulary mediate the borrowing profile of a language

What we talk about when we talk about color

Storytelling, like language, is central to human cognition: it helps us process experiences (Wilkens et al, 2005), store memories (Nelson, 1993; Schank & Abelson, 1995), and form personal identities (Young & Saver, 2001; Yuval-Davis, 2006). Previous studies have used iterated learning to examine the role of cultural transmission in the evolution of language (Smith, Kirby & Brighton, 2003; Kirby, Cornish & Smith, 2008; Kirby, Griffiths & Smith, 2014), and reveal content biases for social and survival information in the transmission of narratives (Bartlett, 1920; Stubbersfield, Tehrani & Flynn, 2014; 2017). This experiment combined the transmission chain paradigm with task-based experiments (Bahrami et al, 2010; Bjørndahl et al, 2014; Thompson et al, 1993) to test whether exposure to social survival information through narrative improves performance in a social task: a game in which participants had to learn a set of novel, arbitrary social customs to succeed. In two conditions, participants then wrote either a story or list, designed to memorably communicate the customs to the next player, forming a transmission chain (see demo here: https://bit.ly/narrative-game). Scores in the task improved over generations in both conditions, supporting the hypothesis that narratives can effectively communicate social survival information in transmission. These results are compatible with Dunbar’s (1997) social brain hypothesis, the ‘problem simulation theory of storytelling’ (Gottschall, 2012 p. 63), and previous experimental work on content biases (Stubbersfield, Tehrani & Flynn 2014; 2017). We provide an experimental paradigm which can now be adapted to target more specific questions about the evolution of narratives.

True story: Narrative as an adaptation for the communication of social survival information

Swarm Robotics, which studies collective behaviors of large populations of robots with simple embodied cognition, is an ideal testbed for studying the cultural evolution of language. Our goal is to expand existing simulations in order to explore a dominant theory in evolutionary linguistics - the self-domestication hypothesis - which suggests that reduced reactive aggression led to the sophistication of the cultural niche, enabling the complexification of languages. 

Current swarm robotics models, however, lack several crucial features that are considered prerequisites for this process. Robots are typically collaborative, homogenous, with little to no memory. To mimic self-domestication, an evolutionary advantage for prosociality needs to be introduced, and robots need to be treated as distinct individuals. 

In our model, robots explore their environment while playing a language game. Crucially, we include two novel features: (1) robot individuation: robots have a partner-specificity memory, keeping track of the outcomes of past interactions with specific robots; (2) parameterizable prosociality: robots’ tendency to interact is based on experience: successful communications between robots reduce their aggression toward each other and increase their chance to interact again. With these manipulations, community structure should emerge (robots favoring interaction with some robots over others, i.e., “in-group” bias), and different lexicons should stabilize in different sub-groups in the swarm despite their physical proximity. 

Future steps will introduce an underlying task requiring robots to cooperate using their shared language to achieve a goal. In this context, more complex language structures should evolve, demonstrating the positive feedback loop between increased self-domestication and language complexity.

A swarm robotics model of the cultural evolution of language

Conventions form an essential part of human social and cultural behaviour and may also be important to other animals. Yet, despite the wealth of evidence that has accumulated for culture in non-human animals, we know surprisingly little about non-human conventions beyond a few rare examples. We follow the literature in behavioural ecology and evolution and define conventions as behaviours that solve a coordination problem in which two or more individuals need to display complementary behaviour to obtain a mutually beneficial outcome. We review and discuss the literature on conventions in non-human primates and come to the conclusion that all the ingredients for conventions to emerge are present and therefore that they ought to be more frequently observed. We probe emergence of conventions by using a unique novel experimental system in which two baboons (Papio papio) can voluntarily participate together in touch-screen based cognitive testing and we show that conventions readily emerge in our experimental setup and that they share three fundamental properties of human conventions (arbitrariness, stability and efficiency). These results question the idea that imitation is necessary to establish conventions.

The experimental emergence of convention in a non-human primate

While previous studies testing evolutionary models of religious morality found that beliefs in moralizing and punitive gods decrease local favoritism and increase resource-sharing with distant co-religionists, the effects of beliefs related to local supernatural agents have not been extensively explored. Nam (the spirit of a deceased person) beliefs are quite ambiguous because the spirit may be linked to ancestor worship but also to the practice of sorcery (illegal in Mauritius). Importantly, previous studies suggested that sorcery beliefs and practices can have a damaging impact on social bonds and trust, but such research is often limited by social stigma associated with sorcery and relevant comparison with other local deities is often missing. We show that endorsing the sorcery mode of belief in nam together with performing rituals toward nam was associated with larger probability of breaking the game rules for selfish outcomes in the Random Allocation Game (compared to the ancestor worship mode).

Effects of sorcery beliefs on parochial prosociality in Mauritius

In cultural transmission, information flows from ‘producers’ to ‘receivers’. Transmission biases such as content-, model- and frequency-based biases, which modulate the adoption of cultural traits by receivers, have been explored in depth. We focus instead on a bias on production and compare transmission fidelity when producers either intend to teach or intend to reproduce socially acquired information.

Eighty participants were asked to read a story and reproduce it either in order to ‘teach it to someone else’ or just ‘recall it as accurately as possible’. In order to test whether differences in fidelity between these two tasks were related to information encoding (during reading) or to reproduction, we also manipulated the timing of instructions: Half of the participants were informed of the task (Teach or Recall) Before reding the story and the other half, After reading the story. Participants were arranged in 20 transmission chains of 4 generations. The first generation in each chain read a text about the environment (from Mesoudi et al., 2006), and subsequent generations read the previous participant’s output story. We measured two aspect of fidelity: Quantity and Accuracy of information retained over generations. 

We found that being informed of the task Before reading the story led to higher Accuracy and Quantity than being informed After reading. Surprisingly, Teaching yielded lower Accuracy than Recall, but both resulted in similar Quantity retained. Additional analyses revealed differences in the content of the information under Teaching and Recall. We conclude that aspects of cultural transmission pertaining to production, in particular, intention to teach vs reproduce, influence transmission dynamics and therefore need to be integrated in models of cultural evolution.

Reference
Mesoudi, A., Whiten, A., & Dunbar, R. (2006). A bias for social information in human cultural transmission. British Journal of Psychology, 97(3), 405–423.

Effects of intent (teaching vs accurate reproduction) on the cultural evolution of narratives

Selection for more efficient socially learned behaviors over alternatives is crucial for cultural evolution, however our understanding of this process of cultural selection in animals is limited. Using artificial populations of wild-caught great tits (Parus major), we conducted a cultural diffusion experiment to ask whether more efficient foraging traditions can replace an established tradition, and how this process might be affected by turnover. We show that gradual replacement of individuals greatly increases the probability that a more efficient behavior will out-compete an established inefficient behavior. Turnover does not increase innovation rates, but instead increases adoption rates, as immigrants are more susceptible to the novel, more efficient behavior. We go on to show that this effect might extend beyond birds by using an an agent based model to test the effect of turnover across populations of different types of learners. Altogether, these results provide strong evidence for cultural selection for efficiency in animals, and highlight mechanisms that link population turnover to this process.

The importance of population turnover for the evolution of efficiency

Argument-making, the giving of reasons to believe something, is a central feature of modern life. Ideas spread and are selected for in part because of the arguments we can make on their behalf. While long-standing philosophical accounts parse arguments into deductive, inductive, and potentially abductive patterns, we know very little about the patterns people actually deploy in real-world situations. This leaves us blind to a key selection mechanism in the cultural evolution of ideas. To address this gap, we combine simple tools from natural-language processing with a corpus of over one million argument-making posts in the Reddit forum r/askphilosophy, the “rationalist” website LessWrong, and a corpus of academic articles in philosophy. Our analysis reveals a system of argument-making patterns entirely distinct from the traditional Aristotelian taxonomy. In particular, we show the existence of a certainty-doubt pattern, associated with arguments that compare and contrast relative confidence, a category-making pattern, associated with arguments that consider the sharpness or vagueness of category boundaries, and a question-rephrasing pattern, associated with revising and rewriting a standard view. These provide new insights into social cognition, the dynamics of argument-making in interpersonal exchanges, and the ways that ideas may thrive, or not, on the basis of the argument-patterns they make possible. Our work provides a “plug-and-play” tool for other researchers to analyse the argument patterns their own corpora of interest, and suggests the possibility of new, joint endeavors to look for the universals of argument-making across culture and time.

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