Environmental variability shapes the representational format of cultural learning

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Roberts-Gaal, Xavier; Bolic, Marija; Cushman, Fiery A.
• 署名单位: Harvard University; University of Toronto
• 刊物名称: PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0027-8424; 1091-6490
• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2505283122
• 发表日期: 2025-07-07
• 页码: e2505283122
• 关键词: Cultural evolution; social learning; Model-free; model-based; environmental variability; niche

摘要

Cumulative culture requires learning mechanisms that are both efficient and flexible in the face of environmental change. We examine models of this learning mechanism that emphasize teaching what to do (causally opaque procedures) and those that foreground what to aim for and why (goals and causal reasoning). Learning procedures is cheap but inflexible; learning goals is more flexible to changing circumstance, but requires expensive individual learning about how to achieve them. In an iterated learning experiment, we demonstrate that cultural learning adapts in precisely this way: Microcultures more often instruct future generations to follow procedures when the world is stable, but they tend to share information about valuable outcomes and causal relations when the world is variable.