ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Cumulative cultural learning: Development and diversity.
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 44 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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
44 citing papers in PubMed.
- A population threshold for dedicated teaching.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Experimental emergence of conventions in human dyads.PloS one · 2026Article
- Pragmatics and Theory of Mind across cultures.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Article
- Motor synchrony, social learning and closeness in group play settings.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Ethical and epistemic costs of a lack of geographical and cultural diversity in developmental science.Developmental psychology · 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
- The Evolution of Symbolic Thought: At the Intersection of Schizophrenia Psychopathology, Ethnoarchaeology, and Neuroscience.Culture, medicine and psychiatry · 2024Article
- Unpredictable benefits of social information can lead to the evolution of individual differences in social learning.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Cultural evolution: A review of theoretical challenges.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Review
- Young people on social media in a globalized world: self-optimization in highly competitive and achievement-oriented forms of life.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Early social-cognitive development as a dynamic developmental system-a lifeworld approach.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Learning few-shot imitation as cultural transmission.Nature communications · 2023Article
- The Intergenerational Transmission of Maladaptive Parenting and its Impact on Child Mental Health: Examining Cross-Cultural Mediating Pathways and Moderating Protective Factors.Child psychiatry and human development · 2023Article
- Superhuman artificial intelligence can improve human decision-making by increasing novelty.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- The cultural evolution of teaching.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Review
- Article
- Biological adaptations for cultural transmission?Biology letters · 2022Review
- Niche Diversity Predicts Personality Structure Across 115 Nations.Psychological science · 2022Article
- Complex foraging behaviours in wild birds emerge from social learning and recombination of components.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
Abstract
The complexity and variability of human culture is unmatched by any other species. Humans live in culturally constructed niches filled with artifacts, skills, beliefs, and practices that have been inherited, accumulated, and modified over generations. A causal account of the complexity of human culture must explain its distinguishing characteristics: It is cumulative and highly variable within and across populations. I propose that the psychological adaptations supporting cumulative cultural transmission are universal but are sufficiently flexible to support the acquisition of highly variable behavioral repertoires. This paper describes variation in the transmission practices (teaching) and acquisition strategies (imitation) that support cumulative cultural learning in childhood. Examining flexibility and variation in caregiver socialization and children's learning extends our understanding of evolution in living systems by providing insight into the psychological foundations of cumulative cultural transmission-the cornerstone of human cultural diversity.
Indexed as
Identifiers
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.