Cultural psychology, and other social sciences (e.g. cultural anthropology, sociology), seek to document cultural variation, yet have difficulty providing strong empirical tests of explanations for that variation. It is argued here that an effective means of testing hypotheses regarding the origin of, and persistence and change in, cultural variation is by simulating cultural transmission in th...

Cultural evolution is a complex process that can happen at several levels. At the level of individuals in a population, each human bears a set of cultural traits that he or she can transmit to its offspring (vertical transmission) or to other members of his or her society (horizontal transmission). The relative frequency of a cultural trait in a population or society can thus increase or decrea...

I n "Cultural Transmission, Disproportionate Prior Expos ure, and th e Evolu ti on of Cooperation," Mark (2002) claims to have "condueted a formal theoretical analysis that isolated the logic of cultural transmission (to] reveal an evolutionary force toward cooperation under conditions previously thought to make the evolution of cooperation impossible" (p. 324). The most striking aspect of Mark...

Phylogenetic methods have recently been applied to studies of cultural evolution. However, it has been claimed that the large amount of horizontal transmission that sometimes occurs between cultural groups invalidates the use of these methods. Here, we use a natural model of linguistic evolution to simulate borrowing between languages. The results show that tree topologies constructed with Baye...

This paper shows how the performance of a genetic programming system can be improved through the addition of mechanisms for non-genetic transmission of information between individuals (culture). Teller has previously shown how genetic programming systems can be enhanced through the addition of memory mechanisms for individual programs [Teller 1994]; in this paper we show how Teller’s memory mec...

Reading is the processing of written language. Family resemblance for reading (dis)ability might be due to transmission of a genetic liability or due to family environment, including cultural transmission from parents to offspring. Familial-risk studies exploring neurobehavioral precursors for dyslexia and twin studies can only speak to some of these issues, but a combined twin-family study can...

Cooperative behavior depends on cultural environment, so what happens when people move from to a new culture governed by a new norm? The dynamics of culture-induced cooperation has not been well understood. We expose lab participants to a sequence of different subject pools while playing a constrained Trust Game. We find prior exposure to different subject pools does in fact influence cooperati...

Cultural transmission (CT) describes the myriad processes whereby information is transmitted from a transmitter to a recipient. Much empirical and modelling research suggests that there are many different pathways and biases through which such information is transmitted. In particular, the content, context, and mode of the transmission can structure variation over time and space in resulting in...

Field reports suggest that orangutans acquire local traditions by observing neighbouring conspecifics. However, there is little direct evidence of social learning to support this conclusion. The present study investigated whether orangutans would learn a novel foraging method through observation of a conspecific in a diffusion-chain paradigm testing for the spread of the behaviour. A foraging b...