ArticleFrontiers in neurorobotics2022
Small steps for mankind: Modeling the emergence of cumulative culture from joint active inference communication.
Article in Frontiers in neurorobotics, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Game of Self: Identity and Experience as Active Inference.Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc · 2026Article
- Active inference as a model of collision avoidance behavior in human drivers.Nature communications · 2026Article
- The Physics and Metaphysics of Social Powers: Bridging Cognitive Processing and Social Dynamics, a New Perspective on Power Through Active Inference.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- As One and Many: Relating Individual and Emergent Group-Level Generative Models in Active Inference.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Introducing ActiveInference.jl: A Julia Library for Simulation and Parameter Estimation with Active Inference Models.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Formalizing Lacanian psychoanalysis through the free energy principle.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Imagination vs. routines: festive time, weekly time, and the predictive brain.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2024Article
- Collective predictive coding hypothesis: symbol emergence as decentralized Bayesian inference.Frontiers in robotics and AI · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Although the increase in the use of dynamical modeling in the literature on cultural evolution makes current models more mathematically sophisticated, these models have yet to be tested or validated. This paper provides a testable deep active inference formulation of social behavior and accompanying simulations of cumulative culture in two steps: First, we cast cultural transmission as a bi-directional process of communication that induces a generalized synchrony (operationalized as a particular convergence) between the belief states of interlocutors. Second, we cast social or cultural exchange as a process of active inference by equipping agents with the choice of who to engage in communication with. This induces trade-offs between confirmation of current beliefs and exploration of the social environment. We find that cumulative culture emerges from belief updating (i.e., active inference and learning) in the form of a joint minimization of uncertainty. The emergent cultural equilibria are characterized by a segregation into groups, whose belief systems are actively sustained by selective, uncertainty minimizing, dyadic exchanges. The nature of these equilibria depends sensitively on the precision afforded by various probabilistic mappings in each individual's generative model of their encultured niche.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.