ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2012
Grist and mills: on the cultural origins of cultural learning.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers.
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Who cites it
37 citing papers in PubMed.
- Anti-social learning: The impact of language on mentalizing.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2025Article
- An empirically-based scenario for the evolution of cultural transmission in the human lineage during the last 3.3 million years.PloS one · 2025Article
- A computational approach to selective attention in embodied approaches to cognitive archaeology.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Review
- Capuchin monkeys learn to use information equally well from individual exploration and social demonstration.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Biological evolution and human cognition are analogous information processing systems.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Article
- The cultural evolution of teaching.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Review
- The sense of should: A biologically-based framework for modeling social pressure.Physics of life reviews · 2021Review
- Exposure to Literary Fiction Is Associated With Lower Psychological Essentialism.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Article
- Flexible learning, rather than inveterate innovation or copying, drives cumulative knowledge gain.Science advances · 2020Article
- Using Experimental Research Designs to Explore the Scope of Cumulative Culture in Humans and Other Animals.Topics in cognitive science · 2020Article
- The effect of exposure to fiction on attributional complexity, egocentric bias and accuracy in social perception.PloS one · 2020Article
- The Cultural Brain Hypothesis: How culture drives brain expansion, sociality, and life history.PLoS computational biology · 2018Article
- The functions of imitative behaviour in humans.Mind & language · 2018Article
- Reconsidering the Mind-Wandering Reader: Predictive Processing, Probability Designs, and Enculturation.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
- Human Teaching and Cumulative Cultural Evolution.Review of philosophy and psychology · 2018Article
- Human nature, human culture: the case of cultural evolution.Interface focus · 2017Article
- Subsistence styles shape human social learning strategies.Nature human behaviour · 2017Article
- What's Special about Human Imitation? A Comparison with Enculturated Apes.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2016Review
Corrections and comments
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1 author.
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Abstract
Cumulative cultural evolution is what 'makes us odd'; our capacity to learn facts and techniques from others, and to refine them over generations, plays a major role in making human minds and lives radically different from those of other animals. In this article, I discuss cognitive processes that are known collectively as 'cultural learning' because they enable cumulative cultural evolution. These cognitive processes include reading, social learning, imitation, teaching, social motivation and theory of mind. Taking the first of these three types of cultural learning as examples, I ask whether and to what extent these cognitive processes have been adapted genetically or culturally to enable cumulative cultural evolution. I find that recent empirical work in comparative psychology, developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience provides surprisingly little evidence of genetic adaptation, and ample evidence of cultural adaptation. This raises the possibility that it is not only 'grist' but also 'mills' that are culturally inherited; through social interaction in the course of development, we not only acquire facts about the world and how to deal with it (grist), we also build the cognitive processes that make 'fact inheritance' possible (mills).
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