Tue 28th January, 11.00-12.30, M3 (room no. 1.05) Appleton Tower

Vanessa Ferdinand

On the coevolution of culture and cognition

Human behavioral artifacts, such as language, music, institutions, laws, and technologies, all change over time.  Why do we use different slang than our parents, why don’t we all know the same songs, and why do we update our software?  One thing all cultural artifacts have in common is that they replicate by passing through a cognitive system; most commonly the human mind.  I propose that the most salient driver of cultural change lies in our cognitive architecture, which is highly structured and biased in terms of what it can perceive, process, and produce.  These biases can be understood as selection pressures, causing changes in cultural artifacts as they are transmitted over several generations of learners.  To illustrate, I will present some of my research on linguistic regularization biases in adult learners and explain how these biases contribute to language change over time. I will also discuss research in the broader framework of iterated
learning, which is explaining how culture adapts to learners, but neglecting the other side of the story: how learners adapt to culture. Learning is an active process that restructures our brain by forming new neural connections and changing the strength of existing ones, both developmentally in childhood and throughout adult life.  Current models tend to use static learners with fixed learning biases. Extending these models with adaptive learning algorithms will take on the complex coevolutionary nature of cultural evolution and provide us with better explanations for the changes we observe.

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