Many real-world tasks involve a mixed-initiative setup, wherein humans and AI systems collaboratively perform a task. While significant work has been conducted towards enabling humans to specify, through language, exactly how an agent should complete a task (i.e., low-level specification), prior work lacks on interpreting the high-level strategic intent of the human commanders. Parsing strategic intent from language will allow autonomous systems to independently operate according to the user's plan without frequent guidance or instruction. In this paper, we build a computational interface capable of translating unstructured language strategies into actionable intent in the form of goals and constraints. Leveraging a game environment, we collect a dataset of over 1000 examples, mapping language strategies to the corresponding goals and constraints, and show that our model, trained on this dataset, significantly outperforms human interpreters in inferring strategic intent (i.e., goals and constraints) from language (p < 0.05). Furthermore, we show that our model (125M parameters) significantly outperforms ChatGPT for this task (p < 0.05) in a low-data setting.

A Computational Interface to Translate Strategic Intent from Unstructured Language in a Low-Data Setting | VIDEO

Globalisation processes have created new economic and educational structures, influencing cultural landscapes globally. These processes also influence the structures and dynamics of families, which play a crucial role in the socialisation of individuals into their cultures. 
Our research explores how these globalisation processes impact cultural change within Mauritian families by exploring the effects of 1) economic and educational development, and 2) outside cultural influences on family structure. We look at these changes in the multicultural transitioning society of Mauritius. As the island is undergoing fast-paced development and cultural change, this allows us to study processes underlying cultural evolution in this population as they are ongoing.
We present data from 14 semi-structured interviews and a quantitative survey. Interview themes explore the dominant family structures, role distribution in households, norm transmission, and how norms may be gendered. We examine the effects of education, economic status, and media exposure from other cultures on household structure, beliefs about fairness about household division of house labour, and social attitudes. 
This research helps explain how kinship structures are changing alongside other forms of development, contributing to our understanding of human socialisation processes and cultural change.

Live - Globalisation of Kinship Norms in Mauritius

Background and Objectives: Traditional rituals continue to face resistance stemming from missionization, the legacy of colonization, globalization, modernization, and Western-centric education. The suppression of these important cultural tools continues to advance ‘imported’ interventions for local communities, disregarding local indigenous knowledge. This study sought to examine the relevance of traditional mourning rituals in community morality and well-being. Anchored in cultural evolution theory, the study employed  quantitative ethnographic research design. Methodology: Data were collected from 45 community elders, 30 bereaved adults, 30 bereaved adolescents, and 8 religious leaders through focus group discussions and interviews from the Luhya community of Western Kenya. Further quantitative data was collected using psychometric survey with Prosociality scale and subjective well being scale. Results: The study established 25 mourning rituals practiced by the Luhya people, each serving an evolutionary function for community survival and wellbeing. Conclusions and implications: The study recommends integrating local cultural knowledge to address community challenges among indigenous communities globally and reducing overreliance on imported solutions from other regions.

**Social media handles** @ASATSAS [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephen-asatsa-phd-b119837a/)

Luhya Traditional Mourning Rituals

In many parts of the world, Indigenous people have to confront new ways of living because of the activities of people from the so-called ‘western world’. Extractive industries and non-governmental organizations are major players in this picture. While these outsiders can cause major disruptions to the local economies and cultures, they also bring new ideas and ways of making a living. Unsurprisingly, there is diversity in who is drawn to the new opportunities, who has the greatest chance of benefiting from them, and who suffers from new inequalities that can emerge.
Our study aims to understand what propels certain people to engage in new cultural practices driven by what is often called ‘globalization’, and how such engagement impacts their health and well-being. Cultural Evolutionary Theory predicts that people are likely to adopt new cultural practices based on individual differences like age, and features of human psychology like a tendency to follow the crowd. Focusing on one village in a remote region of the Republic of the Congo, we ask: What else contributes to people’s decision to embrace the products and practices of globalization? What is the impact of their own cultural preferences and knowledge? Does their perspective on the environment matter? And, for those who adopt new practices, do these improve or harm their health and well-being?

Live - Globalization, Culture and Well-being in Congo

Everyone seems to have an opinion about how teens today fundamentally differ from previous generations as a result of digital media expansion and other forces of modern globalization. Few research studies, however, have investigated this empirically by simultaneously tracking developmental and cultural change over time. This presentation will summarize early findings from field research in northern Thailand tracking stability and change in adolescent moral values over 11 years. In 2012, in-depth interviews were conducted and surveys were administered with 40 Millennial adolescents (Mage = 17.30), evenly divided across rural and urban settings. In 2023, the same data collection techniques were employed with 60 Gen Z adolescents (Mage = 17.47) in the same settings. Analysis of variance of moral values reported on the Ethical Values Assessment (McKenzie & Jensen, 2024; Padilla-Walker & Jensen, 2016) reveal significant change over time among rural and urban Thai adolescents, though the direction of change is at times surprising. Results will be contextualized alongside shifts in digital media availability and adolescent media use over the same 11 years. The discussion will consider what results suggest about how culturally-salient moral values do—and do not—change in the face of rapid technological and cultural change.

Live - Globalized Adolescence: Tracking the Developmental Implications of Modern Globalization in Northern Thailand

**Abstract:**

Research in cultural evolution demonstrates that humans have biases to attend to, remember, and transmit some types of content over others. These biases influence the evolution of diverse cultural phenomena across cultures, including folktales, religious myths, literature, film, and online misinformation. Given the widespread influence of these biases we can anticipate that they also influenced the training data of Large Language Models (LLMs). As the use of LLMs grows, it is important to examine whether they exhibit biases in their output. In five preregistered experiments using material from previous studies with human participants, we use a transmission chain-like methodology to test for content biases in the output of the LLM ChatGPT-3. We find that ChatGPT-3 shows biases analogous to humans for content that is gender-stereotype-consistent, social, negative, threat-related, and biologically counterintuitive, over other content. The presence of these biases in LLM output suggests that such content is widespread in its training data and could have consequential downstream effects, by magnifying pre-existing human tendencies for cognitively appealing and not necessarily informative, or valuable, content.

**Speaker's social media:**

Twitter: @JStubbersfield; Bluesky: @jstubbersfield.bsky.social

RECORDING - Large language models show human-like content biases in transmission chain experiments

**Abstract:**

Cumulative cultural transmission preserves traditional knowledge and practices for generations, yet this phenomenon is largely understudied in Asian artistic traditions. Our talk aims to describe the cultural transmission process within the miniature painting community in Rajasthan, India. The apprenticeship model in miniature painting provides a unique context for studying how the ritualization of acquiring mastery manifests through procedural rigidity, conformity, and religious integration. Artists (N=262) ranging from novices to experts were interviewed to examine the extent to which the acquisition of mastery is ritualized. The results revealed that novice artists adhere more closely to the chronological order of prescribed steps in producing miniature paintings than their more expert counterparts. Most artists agreed that novices should conform to traditional aesthetics more than experts. Mastery of technical skills and extensive knowledge of culture and religion were deemed essential for artists before engaging in innovation. We also found the process of miniature painting to resemble a religious act, with its emphasis on customs, purity, and reverence. Our research highlights the function of ritualization in learning Indian miniature painting. Ritualization ensures the preservation of distinctive aesthetics, uniformity in learning, and the integration of spiritual and religious beliefs in the cultural transmission of traditional arts.

**Speaker's social media:**

Twitter: @Faiz04Hashmi
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/faiz-hashmi-99b40078/

LIVE - The functions of ritualization in acquiring mastery: Cultural transmission of Indian miniature paintings

**Abstract:**

Archeological findings indicate that around 400KYA-200KYA in the eastern levant, ancient humans followed a new type of habitation style, basecamp cave dwelling. This entailed multiple small groups living in the same environment for long stretches of time, foraging for resources in different parts of the environment during the day and meeting back at the cave for shelter. We suggest that this habitation pattern could support the gradual development of complex social learning skills. Initially, basecamp habitation allowed tracking different group members’ expertise in resource attainment, and the development of prestige bias. In addition, based on their knowledge of the common environment, individuals could infer where other individuals foraged that day, and gain counterfactual information about the richness of the environment. Intentional signaling using distinct local markers could increase information transmission fidelity. Using simulations of computational models, we show that material benefits gradually increase with the level of sophistication of social learning strategies. This increase was more distinct in larger environments with multiple foraging opportunities. Our work highlights the way habitation patterns and physical settings which humans occupied could support the development of complex social learning skills, and the way environmental characteristics could serve as a common framework for communication.

**Speaker's social media:**

@uhertz

RECORDING - Ancient humans’ basecamp habitation pattern and the transition from experience-based to information-based social learning

**Abstract:**

In many real-world contexts, individuals face collective action problems at multiple scales, effectively choosing between local and global cooperation. Unlike isolated public goods scenarios, which can be solved if enough players are willing to cooperate, multilevel collective action problems present an additional difficulty of coordination in working towards the same goals. Through a behavioural experiment, we explore how people navigate these multiscale cooperation dilemmas and investigate the interaction between cooperative behaviour and perceptions of social identity. We find that introducing a local cooperation option undermines global cooperation efforts. Moreover, the presence of a local option exacerbates parochial biases, partly connected to a performance-cohesion effect, whereby successful cooperation within groups is associated with social identification with that group. While increasing the relative saliency and rewards of global cooperation can recover global cooperation levels, parochial biases persist. Our results highlight how complex group structures can influence behaviour and beliefs, potentially hindering global cooperation efforts and introducing complicated social cohesion dynamics.

**Speaker's social media:**

@charliepilgrim

LIVE - Competing scales of cooperation

**Abstract:**

In this submission, we explore the concept of "machine culture", describing culture that is mediated or generated by machines. In particular, we review existing and foreseeable instances where intelligent machines are transforming evolutionary processes of culture at the levels of variation, transmission, and selection. Empirical evidence highlights that machine culture is already occurring: models using reinforcement learning are enhancing variation when they inspire humans to develop novel behaviors, as has been demonstrated for the ancient game of Go (Shin et al. 2023); Large Language Models are facilitating the transmission of cultural knowledge and redefining the value of human creative skills (Epstein et al. 2023); and recommender systems are rewiring pathways of cultural transmission by selecting what and from whom humans learn. Compared to humans, machine intelligence is structurally different, trained differently, and subject to different computational constraints (Gershman et al. 2015, Griffiths 2020). We investigate how these idiosyncrasies of machines might reshape cultural variation, transmission, and selection. Ultimately, our contribution presents a research agenda and a conceptual framework that can be leveraged for deeper investigations of machine culture.

**Speaker's social media:**

@LevinBrinkmann

LIVE - Machine culture

**Abstract:**

Context
The cultural evolution of quantification systems is a recent phenomenon traced back to the Neolithic. Yet, research shows that basic mathematical ideas are part of human core knowledge and likely developed early in evolution. How such core knowledge gave way to complex, culturally diverse mathematical ideas is not fully understood. 
Purpose
This paper focuses on the potential mathematics implicit in material culture, including finished artefacts, the production of tools, and processing of materials, using fibre technologies as a prime example of how material culture preserves, transmits, and transforms mathematical knowledge. 
Methods
A comparative approach linking the ethnomathematics of fibre technologies to cognitive research and relevant archaeological evidence of string, basketry, and weaving, provides a way of testing hypotheses on the origins and development of mathematics in the remote past.
Key results
Results support the premise that weaving practices contain and afford operations such as geometry, measurement, ordering, grouping, and counting. Fibre technologies likely provided a context for the development of mathematical ideas over the past 100,000 years, intensifying during the Upper Palaeolithic. 
Implications
Archaeological material culture is an underused resource that can inform about the development of mathematical knowledge prior to the emergence of formal systems of quantification. 

**Speaker's social media:**



LIVE - The cultural evolution of mathematics through fibre technologies

**Abstract:**

Human technology is an open-ended system that increases in diversity and complexity over time. Explanations of open-endedness normally appeal to the idea of cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) and the ability to accumulate increasingly effective solutions. Less attention is paid to the search spaces in which cultural evolution unfolds and how changes to these spaces induce open-ended growth. Adopting a macrolevel modelling approach, where cultural evolutionary dynamics are simulated as two interacting processes of optimization (where populations generate and filter for increasingly effective technologies) and discovery (where populations change their existing search space in an effort to seek out new configurations), we investigate the situations in which open-ended CCE does and does not emerge. A key finding is that populations routinely end up in optimization traps: here, the long-term dynamics gravitate towards an equilibrium state, failing to exhibit open-ended growth. Escaping these optimization traps requires populations to reach a balance between optimization and discovery, whilst accelerated growth in complexity only occurs when populations engage in directed expansion of the search space. Such findings suggest that discovery dynamics, and the ability of populations to change the underlying search space, are a fundamental limiting or enabling constraint on the open-ended evolution of technology.

**Speaker's social media:**

@replicatedtypo

Underline digital video library

A Computational Interface to Translate Strategic Intent from Unstructured Language in a Low-Data Setting | VIDEO

Live - Globalisation of Kinship Norms in Mauritius

Luhya Traditional Mourning Rituals

Live - Globalization, Culture and Well-being in Congo

Live - Globalized Adolescence: Tracking the Developmental Implications of Modern Globalization in Northern Thailand

RECORDING - Large language models show human-like content biases in transmission chain experiments

LIVE - The functions of ritualization in acquiring mastery: Cultural transmission of Indian miniature paintings

RECORDING - Ancient humans’ basecamp habitation pattern and the transition from experience-based to information-based social learning

LIVE - Competing scales of cooperation

LIVE - Machine culture

LIVE - The cultural evolution of mathematics through fibre technologies

LIVE - Minimal requirements for the open-ended cultural evolution of technology

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