Abstract
Many human cultural traits become increasingly beneficial as they are repeatedly transmitted, thanks to an accumulation of modifications made by successive generations. But how do later generations typically avoid modifications which revert traits to less beneficial forms already sampled and rejected by earlier generations? And how can later generations do so without direct exposure to their predecessors' behavior? One possibility is that learners are sensitive to cues of non-random production in others' behavior, and that particular variants (e.g., those containing structural regularities unlikely to occur spontaneously) have been produced deliberately and with some effort. If this non-random behavior is attributed to an informed strategy, then the learner may infer that apparent avoidance of certain possibilities indicates that these have already been sampled and rejected. This could potentially prevent performance plateaus resulting from learners modifying inherited behaviors randomly. We test this hypothesis in four experiments in which participants, either individually or in interacting dyads, attempt to locate rewards in a search grid, guided by partial information about another individual's experience of the task. We find that in some contexts, valid inferences about another's behavior can be made from partial information, and these inferences can be used in a way which facilitates trait adaptation. However, the benefit of these inferences appears to be limited, and in many contexts-including some which have the potential to make inferring the experience of another individual easier-there appears to be no benefit at all. We suggest that inferring previous behavior from partial social information plays a minimal role in the adaptation of cultural traits.
Highlights
Many cultural traits, such as those involved in preparing food, locating resources, determining causal relationships, or even designing scientific experiments, are fundamentally “search tasks,” in that they involve searching for and selecting behaviors from a vast number of possible options, in search of behaviors which result in desirable outcomes
Each considering a different context of task completion and transmission of social information, we investigated whether Observers would (a) infer behavior from partial social information of a Demonstrator’s experience of a task and (b) use those inferences to facilitate their own performance on the task
Models with “maximal” random effects structures (Barr, Levy, Scheepers, & Tily, 2013) were considered in the first instance, with random slopes, followed by random intercept terms removed as necessary to address singular fit or non-convergence issues. p < .05 was taken as statistically significant, and for non-logit-linked models p values were estimated from the resultant t-statistics, taking an upper bound for the degrees of freedom as the number of observations minus the number of fixed parameters in the model (Baayen, Davidson, & Bates, 2008)
Summary
Many cultural traits, such as those involved in preparing food, locating resources, determining causal relationships, or even designing scientific experiments, are fundamentally “search tasks,” in that they involve searching for and selecting behaviors from a vast number of possible options, in search of behaviors which result in desirable outcomes For these tasks, users have to balance the benefits of exploiting familiar actions for known rewards with exploring novel actions with unknown payoffs (Hills, Todd, Lazer, Redish, & Couzin, 2015; Wu, Schulz, Speekenbrink, Nelson, & Meder, 2018). In spite of the window of opportunity being bounded and relatively constant, benefits from that learning apparently continue to accrue This suggests that the social information to which later generations are exposed is in itself more valuable to potential learners, relative to equivalent social information which would have been available from observation of members of earlier generations
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