ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2019
High-fidelity copying is not necessarily the key to cumulative cultural evolution: a study in monkeys and children.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Chimpanzees use social information to acquire a skill they fail to innovate.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Conditions under which faithful cultural transmission through teaching promotes cumulative cultural evolution.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Hierarchical structures emerge from the cultural transmission: an iterated learning experiment using a non-linguistic task.Frontiers in artificial intelligence · 2023Article
- Production method of the Königsaue birch tar documents cumulative culture in Neanderthals.Archaeological and anthropological sciences · 2023Article
- Efficiency fosters cumulative culture across species.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 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
- Negative observational learning might play a limited role in the cultural evolution of technology.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Human biases limit cumulative innovation.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- The use of individual, social, and animated cue information by capuchin monkeys and children in a touchscreen task.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- The value of teaching increases with tool complexity in cumulative cultural evolution.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Selection, adaptation, inheritance and design in human culture: the view from the Price equation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Wild primates copy higher-ranked individuals in a social transmission experiment.Nature communications · 2020Article
- Experimental assessment of capacities for cumulative culture: Review and evaluation of methods.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science · 2020Review
- Which way to the dawn of speech?: Reanalyzing half a century of debates and data in light of speech science.Science advances · 2019Review
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5 authors.
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Abstract
The unique cumulative nature of human culture has often been explained by high-fidelity copying mechanisms found only in human social learning. However, transmission chain experiments in human and non-human primates suggest that cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) might not necessarily depend on high-fidelity copying after all. In this study, we test whether defining properties of CCE can emerge in a non-copying task. We performed transmission chain experiments in Guinea baboons and human children where individuals observed and produced visual patterns composed of four squares on touchscreen devices. In order to be rewarded, participants had to avoid touching squares that were touched by a previous participant. In other words, they were rewarded for innovation rather than copying. Results nevertheless exhibited fundamental properties of CCE: an increase over generations in task performance and the emergence of systematic structure. However, these properties arose from different mechanisms across species: children, unlike baboons, converged in behaviour over generations by copying specific patterns in a different location, thus introducing alternative copying mechanisms into the non-copying task. In children, prior biases towards specific shapes led to convergence in behaviour across chains, while baboon chains showed signs of lineage specificity. We conclude that CCE can result from mechanisms with varying degrees of fidelity in transmission and thus that high-fidelity copying is not necessarily the key to CCE.
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