ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
The evolution of cognitive mechanisms in response to cultural innovations.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed.
- 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
- Selection shapes diverse animal minds.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Social demonstration of colour preference improves the learning of associated demonstrated actions.Animal cognition · 2024Article
- Young people on social media in a globalized world: self-optimization in highly competitive and achievement-oriented forms of life.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Sequence representation as an early step in the evolution of language.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Social learning and memory.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Simulation and social network analysis provide insight into the acquisition of tool behaviour in hybrid macaques.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Biological adaptations for cultural transmission?Biology letters · 2022Review
- 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
- Animal cognition in an urbanised world.Frontiers in ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- The Role of the Learner in the Cultural Evolution of Vocalizations.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- The value of teaching increases with tool complexity in cumulative cultural evolution.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Baldwin effects in early stone tools.Evolutionary anthropology · 2020Article
- The Development of Cumulative Cultural Learning.Annual review of developmental psychology · 2019Article
- The complexity of understanding others as the evolutionary origin of empathy and emotional contagion.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Williams Syndrome, Human Self-Domestication, and Language Evolution.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Prehistoric Perspectives on "Others" and "Strangers".Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- 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
- The evolution of the capacity for language: the ecological context and adaptive value of a process of cognitive hijacking.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Review
- Brain size affects performance in a reversal-learning test.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
When humans and other animals make cultural innovations, they also change their environment, thereby imposing new selective pressures that can modify their biological traits. For example, there is evidence that dairy farming by humans favored alleles for adult lactose tolerance. Similarly, the invention of cooking possibly affected the evolution of jaw and tooth morphology. However, when it comes to cognitive traits and learning mechanisms, it is much more difficult to determine whether and how their evolution was affected by culture or by their use in cultural transmission. Here we argue that, excluding very recent cultural innovations, the assumption that culture shaped the evolution of cognition is both more parsimonious and more productive than assuming the opposite. In considering how culture shapes cognition, we suggest that a process-level model of cognitive evolution is necessary and offer such a model. The model employs relatively simple coevolving mechanisms of learning and data acquisition that jointly construct a complex network of a type previously shown to be capable of supporting a range of cognitive abilities. The evolution of cognition, and thus the effect of culture on cognitive evolution, is captured through small modifications of these coevolving learning and data-acquisition mechanisms, whose coordinated action is critical for building an effective network. We use the model to show how these mechanisms are likely to evolve in response to cultural phenomena, such as language and tool-making, which are associated with major changes in data patterns and with new computational and statistical challenges.
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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.