Social learning and the replication process: an experimental investigation

Human cultural traits typically result from a gradual process that has been described as analogous to biological evolution. This observation has led pioneering scholars to draw inspiration from population genetics to develop a rigorous and successful theoretical framework of cultural evolution. Social learning, the mechanism allowing information to be transmitted between individuals, has thus been described as a simple replication mechanism. Although useful, the extent to which this idealization appropriately describes the actual social learning events has not been carefully assessed. Here, we used a specifically developed computer task to evaluate (i) the extent to which social learning leads to the replication of an observed behaviour and (ii) the consequences it has for fitness landscape exploration. Our results show that social learning does not lead to a dichotomous choice between disregarding and replicating social information. Rather, it appeared that individuals combine and tran...

人类文化特质通常源自一个被描述为类似于生物演化的渐进过程。这一发现促使先驱学者从种群遗传学（population genetics）中汲取灵感，构建了一套严谨且颇具成效的文化演化理论框架。社会学习（social learning）作为实现个体间信息传递的机制，由此被归类为一种简易的复制机制。尽管这一理想化模型颇具价值，但它能否准确刻画真实的社会学习事件，尚未得到严谨的评估。本研究借助专门开发的计算机任务，开展两项评估：一是社会学习在多大程度上会促使个体复制观察到的行为；二是该过程对适应度景观（fitness landscape）探索的影响。我们的研究结果表明，社会学习并非仅存在忽视与复制社会信息这两种二元选择。反之，研究结果表明个体实则会整合并……