Previous work on mathematical models of cultural evolution has mainly focused on the diffusion of simple cultural elements. However, a characteristic feature of human cultural evolution is the seemingly limitless appearance of new and increasingly complex cultural elements. Here, we develop a general modelling framework to study such cumulative processes, in which we assume that the appearance ...

This article argues that we need to understand media as spaces where minorities increasingly communicate interests, make claims and mobilize identities. With a focus on diasporic groups, the article looks at the multi-spatial character of communication and mobilization and its consequences for expression and communication of cultural and political belonging. Diasporic groups represent some of t...

In this paper, innovative technologies for the presentation of complex cultural heritage sites with immersive 3D computer graphics are introduced, which are based on new concepts, partly having been adopted from other computer graphics areas to the specific needs for cultural heritage presentations, partly having been developed especially for this purpose. The main focus of this project was to ...

Cultural diversity can have both positive and negative effects on the performance of multinational teams. Positive effects can stem from the wide variety of experiences and methods that a culturally diverse team can draw on to plan and to develop innovative or efficient solutions to a complex problem. However, cultural diversity can also lead to miscommunications and misunderstandings during ta...

Network visualizations are powerful albeit suggestive means to represent and explore complex relations between entities (people, words, places...) and have become increasingly popular with cultural heritage institutions. In this article we briefly introduce the functionality of histoGraph (Wieneke et al. 2014), a technical demonstrator for the network-based analysis of photographs, survey curre...

In recent years, laboratory studies of cultural evolution have become increasingly prevalent as a means of identifying and understanding the effects of cultural transmission on the form and functionality of transmitted material. The datasets generated by these studies may provide insights into the conditions encouraging, or inhibiting, high rates of innovation, as well as the effect that this h...

We discuss the importance of narrative intelligence (story-awareness, story-telling, historical grounding) in regard to an agent’s transcendence of its immediate local temporal context to create a broad temporal horizon in which the experience and future of the agent can be accounted for, together with the advantage that narrative provides to sociality by making the experience of others availab...

Errors occur commonly in healthcare and can cause significant harm to patients. Most errors arise from a combination of individual, system, and communication failures. Neurologists may be involved in harmful errors in any practice setting and should familiarize themselves with tools to prevent, report, and examine errors. Although physicians, patients, and ethicists endorse candid disclosure of...

It has been proposed that cultural evolution was made possible by a cognitive transition brought about by onset of the capacity for self-triggered recall and rehearsal. Here we develop a novel idea that models of collectively autocatalytic networks, developed for understanding the origin and organization of life, may also help explain the origin of the kind of cognitive structure that makes cul...