ReviewProceedings. Biological sciences2018
Cumulative culture in the laboratory: methodological and theoretical challenges.
Review in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cognitive appeal promotes the persistence of inefficient solutions and hinders cumulative cultural evolution.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Article
- Biases in cultural transmission of information about a minimal ingroup.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- When to stop social learning from a predecessor in an information-foraging task.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Trade-offs, control conditions, and alternative designs in the experimental study of cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Review
- Article
- Lessons for Theory from Scientific Domains Where Evidence is Sparse or Indirect.Computational brain & behavior · 2024Article
- Cultural evolution: A review of theoretical challenges.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Review
- Resampling reduces bias amplification in experimental social networks.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- Biological adaptations for cultural transmission?Biology letters · 2022Review
- A cultural evolutionary theory that explains both gradual and punctuated change.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Hybrid social learning in human-algorithm cultural transmission.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2022Article
- Short-term temporal analysis and children's knowledge of the composition of important medicinal plants: the structural core hypothesis.Journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine · 2022Review
- Overcoming Individual Limitations Through Distributed Computation: Rational Information Accumulation in Multigenerational Populations.Topics in cognitive science · 2022Article
- Technical reasoning bolsters cumulative technological culture through convergent transformations.Science advances · 2022Article
- Human biases limit cumulative innovation.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Prestige and content biases together shape the cultural transmission of narratives.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
- From Beethoven to Beyoncé: Do Changing Aesthetic Cultures Amount to "Cumulative Cultural Evolution?"Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
- Evaluating the relative contributions of copying and reconstruction processes in cultural transmission episodes.PloS one · 2021Article
- The Pedagogue, the Engineer, and the Friend : From Whom Do We Learn?Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In the last decade, cultural transmission experiments (transmission chains, replacement, closed groups and seeded groups) have become important experimental tools in investigating cultural evolution. However, these methods face important challenges, especially regarding the operationalization of theoretical claims. In this review, we focus on the study of cumulative cultural evolution, the process by which traditions are gradually modified and, for technological traditions in particular, improved upon over time. We identify several mismatches between theoretical definitions of cumulative culture and their implementation in cultural transmission experiments. We argue that observed performance increase can be the result of participants learning faster in a group context rather than effectively leading to a cumulative effect. We also show that in laboratory experiments, participants are asked to complete quite simple tasks, which can undermine the evidential value of the diagnostic criterion traditionally used for cumulative culture (i.e. that cumulative culture is a process that produces solutions that no single individual could have invented on their own). We show that the use of unidimensional metrics of cumulativeness drastically curtail the variation that may be observed, which raises specific issues in the interpretation of the experimental evidence. We suggest several solutions to these mismatches (learning times, task complexity and variation) and develop the use of design spaces in experimentally investigating old and new questions about cumulative culture.
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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.