Nic Fay is in town and will give us a bonus LEC talk on “Evidence for the cumulative cultural evolution of human communication systems”. Friday 22nd February, 4pm-5.30pm, DSB 1.17. Abstract below.

Evidence for the cumulative cultural evolution of human communication systems

Biological evolution has endowed humans with a second inheritance system that allows people to socially learn from others.  Key benefits of this cultural inheritance system is that it lets people sample cultural traits from many others (not just two parents as per genetic evolution) and it does so on a rapid timescale (relative to genetic change), enabling swift behavioral adaptation in response to changes in the environment.  Whereas the literature has primarily focused on the progressive adaptation of technologies such as canoes and stone tools, less attention has been devoted to the cumulative cultural evolution of social artifacts such as customs and language.  In this talk I will discuss the results of a recent laboratory experiment that examines the task performance of human participants organized into 8-person interactive and non-interactive transmission chains whose task is to communicate a route on a map to their partner.  Progressive adaptation is seen in both conditions (i.e., the routes are reproduced with higher fidelity across generations in both conditions), but the mechanism behind this improvement differs across the interactive and non-interactive conditions.  In the interactive condition performance is explained through interactive grounding processes, whereas in the non-interactive condition task performance is consistent with a biased transmission account.

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