ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2020
Experimental evolutionary simulations of learning, memory and life history.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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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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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.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- The experimental evolution of human culture: flexibility, fidelity and environmental instability.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Introduction to special issue: 'Life history and learning: how childhood, caregiving and old age shape cognition and culture in humans and other animals'.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- The emergence of emotionally modern humans: implications for language and learning.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Review
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humans possess an unusual combination of traits, including our cognition, life history, demographics and geographical distribution. Many theories propose that these traits have coevolved. Such hypotheses have been explored both theoretically and empirically, with experiments examining whether human behaviour meets theoretical expectations. However, theory must make assumptions about the human mind, creating a potentially problematic gap between models and reality. Here, we employ a series of 'experimental evolutionary simulations' to reduce this gap and to explore the coevolution of learning, memory and childhood. The approach combines aspects of theory and experiment by inserting human participants as agents within an evolutionary simulation. Across experiments, we find that human behaviour supports the coevolution of learning, memory and childhood, but that this is dampened by rapid environmental change. We conclude by discussing both the implications of these findings for theories of human evolution and the utility of experimental evolutionary simulations more generally. This article is part of the theme issue 'Life history and learning: how childhood, caregiving and old age shape cognition and culture in humans and other animals'.
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