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Cumulative culture is believed to be a uniquely human form of social learning, and is therefore believed to be key in understanding how humans evolved such complex social organization and technologies. It is reasonable to believe that our capacity for cumulative culture is the result of a series of interconnected, complex evolutionary processes, but humans abilities for teaching, imitation and communication are believed to play a central role. We plan on combining brain imaging techniques and a transmissions chain design with transmission of evolutionary relevant tasks (knot tying and symbol-production) in order to look at the mechanisms of cumulative culture in a new way. By looking at the brain activation involved in acquiring and transferring these skills we aim to offer new insight on the cognitive and behavioral demands of these technologies and their effect on cultural evolution.

CogSci 2022

The cognitive neuroscience of social learning in human evolution

Welcome to the Cultural Evolution Society (CES) Conference 2024, which was a hybrid conference held at Durham University (UK). The conference was hosted in Durham by the Durham Cultural Evolution Research Centre (DCERC) with administrative assistance from the CES Transformation Fund team.

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#### Durham Cultural Evolution Research Centre (DCERC) 
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**Interdisciplinary study of cultural change and diversity**

We are a highly interdisciplinary group of researchers using evolutionary models to study cultural change and diversity. We apply cultural evolutionary methods to a wide variety of topics including cognition, innovation, social learning, technology, art, music, narrative, religion, sociality, language and communication. We have a growing interest in applying cultural evolutionary theory to current societal challenges such as understanding the spread of prosocial health behaviours and health conspiracies. 
**[Discover More](https://www.durham.ac.uk/research/institutes-and-centres/cultural-evolution/)**

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Cultural Evolution Society Conference 2024

The field of cultural evolution is growing in size and scope; its theories, methods and applications - both academic and applied - are getting ever more robust. Do join us in what promises to be an exciting exchange of ideas and a celebration of our field.

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Join us for CogSci2022! Our 44th Annual Conference will be centered around the theme of diversity, with an accompanying range of keynotes and invited speakers who themselves highlight the diversity of our field. Our three symposia are Cognition across Diverse Populations, Cognition within Diverse Societies, and Global Challenges for Cognitive Science. The conference is being offered in a fully hybrid environment for onsite and online attendees.
 
 [**The Program at a Glance can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Cogsci-2022-PAAG-Detailed-July-12final-1.pdf)
 [**The Detailed Program can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/DeArmond-CogSci2022-program-v113-final.pdf)

This conference requires a registration to attend. Please use the link below to secure your ticket. The website will be available to all registered attendees on July 25th. 

[Register to Attend](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/registration/)

The 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society highlighted research on the theme Cognitive Diversity in addition to the full breadth and diversity of research topics offered by the society’s membership. 





When researching social insects, interpretations drawing parallels between behaviours and social systems of humans and animals are particularly prevalent. While these comparisons have value for illustrative purposes, failing to recognize them as metaphors can result in erroneous interpretations of data. Previous studies have found this anthropomorphic bias to be connected to extraversion and sociability. 
Autistic individuals are overrepresented in the life sciences, may be less prone to cognitive bias, yet still face significant stigma in the workplace. In this interdisciplinary study, we therefore surveyed an international sample of social insect scientists to explore the impact of autistic traits on their research.
We herein present the first results of this study, and discuss them from the standpoints of cognitive science, philosophy of psychiatry, and entomology.
We thereby hope to elucidate the role of neurodiversity and atypical modes of perception in science, and contribute to creating a more inclusive academic landscape.

Neurodiversity and anthropomorphism in social insect research

This study explored how sociocultural pressures and internalized beauty ideals play a role in how women and men perceive the attractiveness of different body types of the same and opposite gender. Results showed that when judging the attractiveness of bodies of the same gender, internalized beauty ideals have different effects on women and men. Women’s judgments of the attractiveness of female bodies are predicted by the pressure exerted by a thin beauty ideal, while men’s judgments of the attractiveness of male bodies are predicted instead by a muscular beauty ideal. Attractiveness judgments for bodies of the opposite gender are influenced by the pressure to be thin and the perceived influence of significant others. Sociocultural pressures also have a stronger effect on women than men. These findings offer an initial window into the distinct factors that shape body image construction for the digital generation of women and men.

Internalized Beauty Ideals and Sociocultural Pressures Shape How Young Women and Men Perceive Body Attractiveness

How do individuals select which of multiple sources of information to attend to, and which events and entities in their environment to solicit more information about? This study
aims at understanding whether adults actively solicit information that they are missing to fill gaps in their knowledge of recently learned novel word-object associations. In other
words, we ask whether adults actively solicit the labels of objects they are not confident about. Furthermore, given the role of confidence on the influence of feedback on word learning, we ask whether the beneficial effects of feedback on errors vary as a result of the confidence learners have in their knowledge of newly learned novel word-object associations. We will also compare the findings of this study to the results of a study with the same design that was conducted with preschoolers.

Active learning, feedback and hypercorrection effect in word learning

According to Rozenblit & Keil (2002), attempting a mechanistic explanation of a concrete phenomenon results in reduced self-reported knowledge, suggesting that the latter is normally overestimated (Illusion of Explanatory Depth or IoED). Fernbach and Sloman (2013) demonstrated the effect in sociopolitical issues, finding that causal explanation results in short-term moderation of belief extremity. While the effect of explanation on knowledge self-estimation has been robustly replicated, debates about the impact on extremity continue. Here, we replicate both effects in an online sample of Iranians (N=100 and p<.05). Given IoED’s reliance on mechanistic framing, we further hypothesized that the more concrete construal afforded national hot-button issues would produce a more robust effect compared to international ones. Our experiment indeed found stronger IoED effects on both knowledge estimation (p<.005) and belief extremity (p<.003) across national issues. We discuss how this moderation intervention can be helpful in extremism context.

The moderation effect of Illusion of Explanatory Depth of Knowledge towards National and International Issues

People expect others to take efficient paths toward goals. Inefficiency changes how we categorize actions, leading us to see actions as play (Chu & Schulz, 2020), or as movements performed for their own intrinsic value (Schachner & Carey, 2013). Here we find that performing actions for their own value (e.g., aesthetic value), versus for instrumental purposes, provides social information about others. In a pre-registered experiment (N=360), participants judged which character in a pair was more compassionate, or more selfish/manipulative. For one key pair (among distractors), both characters performed the same activity (music, painting, eating, exercising, math, being in nature), and we manipulated why: Either for its own aesthetic value, or as a means-to-an-end (instrumental value). Across all activities, aesthetically-motivated characters were judged as more compassionate and less selfish/manipulative than instrumentally-motivated characters (p’s<0.01). Aesthetically-motivated behavior may signal others’ emotionality moreso than instrumentally-motivated activities, driving inferences about prosociality.

People think of others as more prosocial when they are motivated by aesthetic goals vs. instrumental goals

We present proof-of-concept modeling results which demonstrate a novel way to evaluate theories of the structure of the phonological grammar: We generate predictions of how the behavior of constraint-based grammars and analogical models is likely to change under processing load. Previous results (Moore-Cantwell and Kush, 2019) show systematic differences in participant behavior when generating novel forms under working memory load, vs not. Under load, participants observed fewer generalizations of the language, produced less intra-speaker variation, and differed more participant-to-participant. We modeled memory load in constraint-based grammar (MaxEnt, Goldwater and Johnson, 2003) via probabilistic ignoring of constraints. Memory load in analogy (TiMBL, Daelemans et al., 2018) was modeled as a restricting of the search space for an analogical set, based on word-frequency. Our constraint-based model predicted a more systematic breakdown, more in line with previous experimental findings, while our analogical model predicted more word-to-word variation.

Modeling grammatical breakdown under processing load

In conversation, interlocutors rapidly exchange well-timed turns-at-talk, generally starting to plan their contributions already during the incoming turns. Previous research showed that while this early-planning-strategy supports fast turn-taking, it comes with increased planning difficulty compared to planning after the incoming turn. The present study investigates whether concurrent planning is also detrimental to speech input comprehension, targeting the level of phonological processing. 60 subjects conducted a dual-task experiment, verbally responding to auditorily presented quiz-questions while simultaneously monitoring them for pre-specified target phonemes (60% present), pressing the space-bar upon encounter. Subjects’ monitoring performance for phonemes encountered during response planning was significantly worse than for phonemes encountered when response planning was not yet possible. Additionally, phoneme detection latencies were significantly longer when concurrently planning a verbal response than in a single-task phoneme-detection control experiment. Thus, results indicate that parallel speech planning, while common, leads to decreased input processing, possibly due to interference effects.

Reduced phonological processing during speech-planning

First language learners use various linguistic cues to construct their language(s)’ grammar. I study how phonological and morphological structures interact in the minds of two young learners of Russian (1;6 - 2;11 years of age) and their caretakers. While phonology is traditionally recognized to develop ahead of morphology, my data show a ‘backward’ directionality for the younger child only: the grasp of consonant cluster inventory depends on the rising morphological complexity, measured as a number of morphemes per word.
This interaction is first backed by consonant clustering, being a natural result of phonological alternations at the morpheme boundary; and second, by language pathology data, an aphasic patient attempting to improve the coda sonority in inflected words but not monomorphemic ones during speech production.
If this result is validated on a larger sample, the finding is meaningful both theoretically and practically for the speech therapy procedures.

Morphological Strengthening of Phonological Performance in Child Speech

A challenge in learning phonological grammars is learning how phonological processes interact. It has been argued that some process interactions are easier to learn than others. One basis for this argument is asymmetries observed in experimental settings: artificial languages generated from certain process interactions are more likely to be successfully reproduced by participants than others. In this paper, we argue that asymmetries in production do not necessarily provide direct support that some phonological interactions are easier to learn. Rather, we show that these asymmetries can instead emerge due to differences in the number of consistent or nearly-consistent grammars each pattern has. We present a noisy channel model of morpho-phonological learning and apply it to a recent behavioral study examining the learnability of phonological process interactions. We find that, due to the relative difference in the number of grammars that can exactly match or nearly match the observed data, the model achieves the same qualitative results as those observed in experimental settings.

Assessing the learnability of process interactions using grammatical spaces

Previous research suggests that a verb’s meaning is learned partly through the aggregated profile of syntactic frames associated with it. For example, “turn” occurs with transitive and intransitive frames in causative alternation (“He turned the car”/“The car turned”), indicating it is a causal verb. Some evidence demonstrates that young children combine multiple frames to map verbs to appropriate events. However, previous work always presented these frames together, in a single dialogue. What remains unknown is how verb learning occurs when the frames are separated, uttered in different referential contexts, as is likely in children’s everyday life. In a series of cross-situational word-learning experiments, we show that adult learners update their hypothesis about a novel verb's meaning when they encounter the verb again in a new frame, integrating their previous hypothesis about the verb’s meaning with the new frame. These results shed light on the cross-situational mechanisms of syntactic bootstrapping.

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Neurodiversity and anthropomorphism in social insect research

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