This article proposes an acquisition framework that involves horizontal, vertical, and oblique transmissions. Based on a lexicon–syntax coevolution model, it discusses the relative roles of these forms of cultural transmission on language origin and change. The simulation results not only reveal an integrated role of oblique transmission that combines the roles of horizontal and vertical transm...

One of the hallmarks of the human species is our capacity for cumulative culture, in which beneficial knowledge and technology is accumulated over successive generations. Yet previous analyses of cumulative cultural change have failed to consider the possibility that as cultural complexity accumulates, it becomes increasingly costly for each new generation to acquire from the previous generatio...

This paper argues that economic anthropologists need to reduce their reliance on cost-benefit decisionmaking, and incorporate a cognitively informed understanding of social learning, cultural transmission and information processing. Human behavioral patterns are unlikely to be primarily a product of cost-benefit decision-making because: 1) Laboratory data show that human information processing ...

Cultural transmission of information plays a central role in shaping human knowledge. Some of the most complex knowledge that people acquire, such as languages or cultural norms, can only be learned from other people, who themselves learned from previous generations. The prevalence of this process of "iterated learning" as a mode of cultural transmission raises the question of how it affects th...

background: despite the success of developed countries in preventing the spread of hiv/aids, the disease is expanding in developing countries where an unfavorable attitude exists among people, health professionals and employees. this study aimed to assess the stigmatized attitude among health care providers toward people living with hiv (plwha). methods: the study is a cross-sectional survey. t...

Looking across human societies reveals regularities in the languages that people speak and the concepts that they use. One explanation that has been proposed for these “cultural universals” is differences in the ease with which people learn particular languages and concepts. A difference in learnability means that languages and concepts possessing a particular property are more likely to be acc...

Human cultural traits-behaviors, ideas, and technologies that can be learned from other individuals-can exhibit complex patterns of transmission and evolution, and researchers have developed theoretical models, both verbal and mathematical, to facilitate our understanding of these patterns. Many of the first quantitative models of cultural evolution were modified from existing concepts in theor...

years in applying the theoretical and methodological tenets of Darwinian evolutionary theory to the archaeological record (e.g., Barton and Clark 1997; Dunnell 1980; Lipo et al. 1997, 2005; Lyman and O’Brien 1998; Neiman 1995; O’Brien 1996; O’Brien and Lyman 2000, 2002, 2003a; Shennan 2002; Shennan and Wilkinson 2001). One of the key theoretical tenets of any theory of Darwinian evolution, be i...