ArticleNature human behaviour2021
Technical reasoning is important for cumulative technological culture.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2021. 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.
- Semantic knowledge guides innovation and drives cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Novel tool use does not depend on mechanical reasoning: evidence from apraxia.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- The roles of cultural transmission and causal reasoning in the cultural evolution of technology.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Article
- The technical-reasoning network is recruited when people observe others make or teach how to make tools: An fMRI study.iScience · 2025Article
- Human culture is uniquely open-ended rather than uniquely cumulative.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- Beware of physiology: Anthropomorphism as a simplification mechanism for mastering complex human-machine interfaces.PloS one · 2025Article
- Article
- The Area Prostriata may play a role in technical reasoning.Behavioral and brain functions : BBF · 2022Article
- The cortical thickness of the area PF of the left inferior parietal cortex mediates technical-reasoning skills.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Technical reasoning bolsters cumulative technological culture through convergent transformations.Science advances · 2022Article
- Negative observational learning might play a limited role in the cultural evolution of technology.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- On the representation of hierarchical structure: Revisiting Darwin's musical protolanguage.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2022Article
- Pantomime of tool use: looking beyond apraxia.Brain communications · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Human technology has evolved in an unparalleled way, allowing us to expand across the globe. One fascinating question is, how do we understand the cognitive origins of this phenomenon, which is known as cumulative technological culture (CTC)? The dominant view posits that CTC results from our unique ability to learn from each other. The cultural niche hypothesis even minimizes the involvement of non-social cognitive skills in the emergence of CTC, claiming that technologies can be optimized without us understanding how they work, but simply through the retention of small improvements over generations. Here we conduct a partial replication of the experimental study of Derex et al. (Nature Human Behaviour, 2019) and show that the improvement of a physical system over generations is accompanied by an increased understanding of it. These findings indicate that technical-reasoning skills (non-social cognitive skills) are important in the acquisition, understanding and improvement of technical content-that is, specific to the technological form of cumulative culture-thereby making social learning a salient source of technical inspiration.
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