ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2015
Evolution of protolinguistic abilities as a by-product of learning to forage in structured environments.
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.
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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.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Sequences and animal intelligence.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Evolution of diverse (and advanced) cognitive abilities through adaptive fine-tuning of learning and chunking mechanisms.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Sequence representation as an early step in the evolution of language.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- A marine cleaning mutualism provides new insights in biological market dynamics.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Modelling how cleaner fish approach an ephemeral reward task demonstrates a role for ecologically tuned chunking in the evolution of advanced cognition.PLoS biology · 2022Article
- The measurement, evolution, and neural representation of action grammars of human behavior.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- The Role of the Learner in the Cultural Evolution of Vocalizations.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Constructive anthropomorphism: a functional evolutionary approach to the study of human-like cognitive mechanisms in animals.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2017Article
- The evolution of cognitive mechanisms in response to cultural innovations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
The skills required for the learning and use of language are the focus of extensive research, and their evolutionary origins are widely debated. Using agent-based simulations in a range of virtual environments, we demonstrate that challenges of foraging for food can select for cognitive mechanisms supporting complex, hierarchical, sequential learning, the need for which arises in language acquisition. Building on previous work, where we explored the conditions under which reinforcement learning is out-competed by seldom-reinforced continuous learning that constructs a network model of the environment, we now show that realistic features of the foraging environment can select for two critical advances: (i) chunking of meaningful sequences found in the data, leading to representations composed of units that better fit the prevalent statistical patterns in the environment; and (ii) generalization across units based on their contextual similarity. Importantly, these learning processes, which in our framework evolved for making better foraging decisions, had been earlier shown to reproduce a range of findings in language learning in humans. Thus, our results suggest a possible evolutionary trajectory that may have led from basic learning mechanisms to complex hierarchical sequential learning that can support advanced cognitive abilities of the kind needed for language acquisition.
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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.