Tuesday 30th September 11.00-12.30, room 1.17 Dugald Stewart Building

The Dynamics of Social Learning on Undirected Networks

Andrew Whalen (University of St. Andrews)

Social networks, and dynamics of processes operating over them have been an exciting area of recent research. However in a wide variety of theoretically interesting processes relating to language and cultural evolution, the structure of the population has minimal effects on the average dynamics of the process. To explore this problem, we examine the influence of a network on three dynamic processes. We find that the learner’s learning rule has a substantial impact on whether or not there exist differences between networks; social structure plays a limited role when learners use a linear learning rule, but may play a larger role (particularly the network’s clustering coefficient) when learners us a non-linear learning rule. We also find that in cases where the difference between networks is minimal, there may be drastic differences in the dynamics of the process depending on where on the network a behavior originated from.

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