ArticlePloS one2022
When does selection favor learning from the old? Social learning in age-structured populations.
Article in PloS one, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 41 citations in OpenAlex.
- Models of Cultural Reproduction as Drivers of Socio-cultural Resilience: Insights from a Systematic Review.F1000Research · 2026Pooled it
- A demographic theory of similarity-biased social learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Article
- Feature-based reward learning shapes human social learning strategies.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Article
- Collective incentives reduce over-exploitation of social information in unconstrained human groups.Nature communications · 2024Article
- A Cognitive Computational Approach to Social and Collective Decision-Making.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
- The interplay between age structure and cultural transmission.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Beyond collective intelligence: Collective adaptation.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Review
- Dynamic social learning in temporally and spatially variable environments.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Culture and demography jointly facilitate flexible human adaptation, yet it still remains unclear how social learning operates in populations with age structure. Here, we present a mathematical model of the evolution of social learning in a population with different age classes. We investigate how demographic processes affect the adaptive value of culture, cultural adaptation and population growth, and identify the conditions that favor learning from older vs. younger individuals. We find that, even with age structure, social learning can evolve without increasing population fitness, i.e., "Rogers' paradox" still holds. However, a process of "demographic filtering", together with cultural transmission, can generate cumulative improvements in adaptation levels. We further show that older age classes have higher proportions of adaptive behavior when the environment is stable and adaptive behavior is hard to acquire but important to survival. Through individual-based simulations comparing temporal and spatial variability in the environment, we find a "copy-the-old"-strategy only evolves when social learning is erroneous and the opposite "copy-the-young"-strategy can function as a compromise between individual and social information use. Our results reveal that age structure substantially changes how culture evolves and provide principled empirical expectations about age-biased social learning and the role of demography in cultural adaptation.
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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.