ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2025
Environmental variability shapes the representational format of cultural learning.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 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
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Representational capacity shapes both the "whether" and "how" of social learning.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Environmental variability shapes the representational format of cultural learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Cumulative culture requires learning mechanisms that are both efficient and flexible in the face of environmental change. We examine models of this learning mechanism that emphasize teaching what to do (causally opaque procedures) and those that foreground what to aim for and why (goals and causal reasoning). Learning procedures is cheap but inflexible; learning goals is more flexible to changing circumstance, but requires expensive individual learning about how to achieve them. In an iterated learning experiment, we demonstrate that cultural learning adapts in precisely this way: Microcultures more often instruct future generations to follow procedures when the world is stable, but they tend to share information about valuable outcomes and causal relations when the world is variable.
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.