Denmark

 Cognitive processes play a central role in our understanding of the sophisticated forms of group coordination and culture found in humans. While explicit aspects of processes such as memory, attention, language, metacognition and mentalising often are highlighted, a significant role is carried out by the more implicit processes and internal cognitive biases, guiding how cultural information is perceived, stored, represented, and reproduced to the world. Research has, for instance, studied how language or semiotic communication systems across iterations can evolve to reflect emergent structure, in which e.g. complexity (size and structure) may be reduced and systematicity increased as a result of particular cognitive constraints. In other words, this research has indicated how we can use experimental transmission chain designs and latent cognitive biases to observe the evolution of increasingly meaningful and symbolic perceptions and systems. In this talk, I will present a study using a drawing task situated in a linear social transmission paradigm. The study was originally designed to be implemented online due to the covid19 pandemic. Participants (N=170) were asked to copy 12 different drawings, and rate their trial confidence, in four different conditions which varied in the degree of demand on memory. The resulting drawings were analysed for complexity, error, submitted to repeated rating of conventionality by a set of raters, and the relationships between transmission and complexity, conventionality, and error were analyzed with Bayesian modeling. Moreover, the drawings were analysed qualitatively for low-level perceptual formation and developments, e.g. the Gestalt principles. The results indicated overall that across iterations the drawings decreased in complexity and error and became more conventional as a function of memory demands, while drawings without memory demands remained complex and unconventional. The perception and re-presentation of drawings also revealed a partial role of our low-level perceptual system in terms of preferences for certain compositions of lines following the Gestalt principles. The results are in line with previous research, finding that latent cognitive biases are introducing systematic distortions and guiding emergent structure towards cultural priors and expectations. The findings suggest that more research is needed to carefully dissect the role of implicit processes as the workhorse of human cognition, i.e. perceptual and object recognition processes and latent cognitive biases in memory, in order to understand how they interact with the more explicit and reportable processes of cognition to form cumulative processes of social learning.

Cultural Evolution Society 2022

Transmission of drawings: the role of memory and latent cognitive biases in a social transmission task

### Welcome to the fourth Cultural Evolution Society Conference, CES2022! 

As last year, Underline will support the online component of the conference. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is causing a great deal of uncertainty for all of us. Therefore, we seek to offer a hybrid format that will hopefully allow some folks to travel to Aarhus, others to meet up locally or regionally in CES hub-lets, and other yet to participate online. 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.

##### ***For SoMe interaction and live tweeting please tag @CulturalEvolSoc and use #CESconf2022***


#### The CES 2022 local organising committee
* Luseadra Joy McKerracher
* Jesper Sørensen 
* Niels Nørkjær Johannsen 
* Benjamin Grant Purzycki 
* Mette Løvschal 
* Felix Riede
* Iza Romanowska 
* Karsten Olsen

Please click on the button bellow if you want to watch the videos

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.

technical paper

**Author(s):** Bourahla Y.; Atencia M.; Euzenat J. Vertical knowledge transmission is expected to enable societies to increase culture fitness over that of a single generation. This has already been demonstrated experimentally for the knowledge that neural network-based agents agents have of their world. However, this approach relies on drastically selecting agents who transmit their knowledge. Here we test if this is necessary. We have designed an agent-based experiment in which agents interact with each other and adapt their knowledge upon interaction failures, so performing horizontal transmission. After interacting for a fixed period the older generation, amounting to half of the agents, dies and the younger half reproduces (without selection). The new generation of agents learns their knowledge from the previous generation without teacher selection (equiprobable chances of knowledge transmission). This showed that knowledge improves across generations with inter-generation transmission. This is in agreement with the previous results. These new results also showed that, when the horizontal transmission period is sufficiently long, there is no need for selecting parents and teachers, for this knowledge to improve. This can be explained by the fact that if culture is widely shared among the population, it will be transmitted without selecting the fittest part of the population.

Inter-generation knowledge transmission without individual selection

**Author(s):** Faessler, L; Lalive, R; Efferson, C Cultural evolution theory implies that social learning can lead cultural groups to differ in the same environment and drive genetic selection. Yet, distinguishing the effect of culture from other confounds is a difficult empirical challenge. To meet this challenge, we exploit the Swiss language border, a cultural border that divides Switzerland without any institutional boundary. Using a regression discontinuity design, we estimate discontinuities in attitudes right at the cultural border. Preliminary results confirm multiple discontinuities related to health and fertility. German speakers are more likely to adopt healthy behaviors and vote against initiatives to share health care costs, while French speakers visit the doctor more often. German speakers report significantly better health but surprisingly do not live longer. Our results provide new evidence that social learning generates cultural variation without environmental variation in health and fertility domains, thus demonstrating the potential for cultural processes to create variation in domains directly related to genetic fitness.

How Culture Affects our Fitness: Evidence from a Swiss Language Border

 Cultural evolutionary science (CES) applies evolutionary theory to culture and cultural change. A central ambition of CES is to synthesise the social sciences. However, for this synthesis to take place, a culture concept is needed that can be consistently applied. In CES, culture is paradigmatically conceptualised as socially transmitted information. Yet, this definition is met with critique from CES

Synthesising the Social Sciences Through a Mechanistic Conception of Culture for Cultural Evolutionary Science

**Author(s):** Toyokawa, W; Gaissmaier, W Introduction: When it comes to making decisions, like choosing a restaurant or political candidate, most of us rely on limited information that is not accurate enough to find the best option. Considering others’ decisions and opinions can help us make smarter choices, a phenomenon called “collective intelligence”. Collective intelligence relies on individuals making unbiased decisions. If

Conformist social learning leads to self-organised prevention against adverse bias in risky decision making

**Author(s):** Araujo, A G M; Okumura, M. The archaeological record is the only long-term record of human culture. Therefore, researchers interested in understanding cultural evolutionary patterns of long duration would greatly benefit from studying archaeological materials. The Cultural Evolutionary Theory postulates that one can approach cultural changes or stasis through evolutionary terms borrowed (and then adapted) from Biological Evolutionary Theory. More recently, there has been a debate about how to observe fitness in cultural evolution. We believe that the debate about fitness can not advance properly without an assessment of three different modalities of knowledge that were devised by Greek philosophers: doxa, sophia, and episteme. Doxa constitutes common sense constructed in an unsystematic way and that form the fabric of relatively uninformed idea of how the world operates. Sophia can be understood as wisdom, or informed knowledge which comes with experience and old age. Episteme is “real knowledge”, which we can translate nowadays as scientific knowledge. It is radically different from doxa and at the same time transcends sophia in the sense that it uses the scientific method, rather than personal experience, to build knowledge about the world. Here we argue that each of these modes of knowledge involves different cultural transmission processes and have distinct consequences in terms of cultural fitness. We propose that the majority of examples and processes discussed in the Cultural Evolutionary literature are related to doxa.

An Archaeological Regard on the Concept of Fitness in Cultural Evolution

**Author(s):** Herzog, N.; Clark, M. We investigate the socioecological conditions which favor the combination of individual and social learning that manifest in the invention and innovation of technology. First, using an agent-based simulation, we predict how ecological variation, population structure, and the costs and accuracy of social learning can affect cultural transmission patterns and cultural variability. Then, we compare archaeological case studies in the American Great Basin and Southwest to test how environmental variation and population structure influence patterns of cultural variation, invention, innovation, and investment in new technologies over time.

From mind to matter: Modeling the ecology of social learning and its archaeological outcomes

**Author(s):** Park P. S.; Savitskiy, V.; Henrich, J. Introduction:
To study the evolutionary puzzles posed by the egalitarian small-scale societies that likely dominated our ancestral past, we develop a cultural-evolutionary model of human groups. It models how the innovation, exchange, and specialization of human groups are affected by their social norms. 
Approach:
In our model, young individuals either apprentice with elder specialists (e.g., hunters, fishers, healers) or innovate new specializations. Elder specialists decide how many apprentices to take on, how much to produce, and how to distribute this production (for intra-group and inter-group exchange) among themselves and their apprentices. These decisions are constrained by the group’s sharing norms. 
Findings:
Long-term group fitness is maximized by a social norm of egalitarianism, which robustly leads to the innovation of the optimal number of specialized niches. In contrast, non-egalitarian groups suffer from a long-term penalty to innovation, and thereby to group fitness. However, non-egalitarian groups' penalty to innovation can be reduced if their young people are acculturated to be overconfident about the prospects of innovating versus apprenticing. 
Discussion:
Egalitarian groups of ancestral humans may have outcompeted their non-egalitarian counterparts due to their greater diversity of specialized niches. Humans’ capacity for overconfidence may have evolved in response: to incentivize innovation at the group level, especially in non-egalitarian societies.

A theory of specialization, exchange, and innovation in human groups

 Multiple iterated language learning studies show that artificial languages evolve over generations towards regularity. This trend has been explained as a reflection of the learners’ biases. We test whether this learning bias for regularity is modulated by culturally acquired knowledge, specifically by familiarity and literacy. We constructed musical languages consisting of signals comprising 6 notes denoting meanings of different shapes and colours. We had three languages, with different levels of structure (irregular, semi-regular and fully regular). In addition, for comparison, we added a fourth language in which signals were spoken words. We trained (1) musically-literate musicians (who can read and write musical notation), (2) musically-illiterate musicians (who are familiar with music, but cannot read and write musical notation) and (3) non-musicians on the four languages, with a 50% bottleneck, meaning they were only exposed to half the meaning-signal pairs. They were then asked to produce signals for the full set of meanings. We measured to what extent they reproduced (a) the original signals and (b) the level of regularity in the original languages. Our results suggest that familiarity helps learn and reproduce the signals of a language, but literacy is required for regularity to be picked up and maintained. This in turn indicates that, by modulating human learning biases, literacy may play a role in the evolution of linguistic structure.

The Role of Practice and Literacy in the Evolution of Linguistic Structure

**Author(s):** Tylén, K; Fusaroli, R; Rojo, S; Heimann, K; Fay, N; Johannsen, NN; Riede, F; Lombard, M Introduction: The Blombos and Diepkloof engravings from South Africa are among the earliest evidence of human symbolic behavior. Of special interest is the temporal trajectory spanning 40 thousand years from earlier simpler parallel lines to later complex cross-hatchings suggesting an adaptive development. We follow up on earlier work (Tylén et al 2020) by investigating the cumulative cultural processes giving rise to these structural changes. We seed transmission chains with early line carvings to compare experimental developments to those observed in the archaeological records. 
 Materials and Methods: 66 participants were divided in 11 chains of 6 generations. Each participant replicated 4 patterns by dragging, rotating and placing lines, and these patterns were presented as stimulus for the next generation. Another 61 participants then participated in a suite of 5 experiments to test the relative saliency, perceived intentionality, memorability, style, and discriminability of the patterns from different generations. 
 Results/discussion: While several of the measures evolve in directions similar to the archaeological records, there are also differences suggesting that transmission alone is not the mechanism by which the Blombos and Diepkloof patterns evolved.

Using transmission chain experiments to investigate the cumulative cultural evolution of the Blombos and Diepkloof engravings

 How do groups of people playfully exploring an open-ended activity build on one another's ideas? What can short-term ethnographic observations of people engaging in playful tinkering tell us about the generation and movement of new ideas through groups?In a recent workshop I invited 14 artists and academics to play with and modify solar powered drawing machines to make marks they felt were aestheticall y interesting. Six more participants were asked to take on the role of "catalysts" by attaching themselves to a pair of tinkerers, documenting new ideas as they emerged, and sharing them with other participants to catalyze the spread of new ideas. The resulting video and notes were edited into a map describing the movement of different ideas through the group. Such a map can be characterized as a map of their collective exploration of what Kauffman called the "adjacent possible." Early observations and selected interviews of participants suggests that the generation of new ideas is complex, with many inputs. It also suggests that those who are skilled at collective aesthetic exploration are utilizing a set of skills that we can begin to characterize.

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