ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2015
Social learning and the replication process: an experimental investigation.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 37 citations in OpenAlex.
- Iconicity Gives Communicators a Head-Start, Even if Only the Producer Experiences It.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Social information use and social information waste.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Cultural adaptation is maximised when intelligent individuals rarely think for themselves.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- Social information can potentiate understanding despite inhibiting cognitive effort.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Innovation and cumulative culture through tweaks and leaps in online programming contests.Nature communications · 2018Article
- Cumulative culture in the laboratory: methodological and theoretical challenges.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Review
- Cultural transmission in an ever-changing world: trial-and-error copying may be more robust than precise imitation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Review
- Foundations of cumulative culture in apes: improved foraging efficiency through relinquishing and combining witnessed behaviours in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).Scientific reports · 2016Article
- The foundations of the human cultural niche.Nature communications · 2015Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Human cultural traits typically result from a gradual process that has been described as analogous to biological evolution. This observation has led pioneering scholars to draw inspiration from population genetics to develop a rigorous and successful theoretical framework of cultural evolution. Social learning, the mechanism allowing information to be transmitted between individuals, has thus been described as a simple replication mechanism. Although useful, the extent to which this idealization appropriately describes the actual social learning events has not been carefully assessed. Here, we used a specifically developed computer task to evaluate (i) the extent to which social learning leads to the replication of an observed behaviour and (ii) the consequences it has for fitness landscape exploration. Our results show that social learning does not lead to a dichotomous choice between disregarding and replicating social information. Rather, it appeared that individuals combine and transform information coming from multiple sources to produce new solutions. As a consequence, landscape exploration was promoted by the use of social information. These results invite us to rethink the way social learning is commonly modelled and could question the validity of predictions coming from models considering this process as replicative.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.