Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, Toulouse School of Economics, Toulouse 31080, France.
Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2024 Nov 26;121(48):e2322886121. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2322886121. Epub 2024 Nov 18.
Although the theoretical foundations of the modern field of cultural evolution have been in place for over 50 y, laboratory experiments specifically designed to test cultural evolutionary theory have only existed for the last two decades. Here, we review the main experimental designs used in the field of cultural evolution, as well as major findings related to the generation of cultural variation, content- and model-based biases, cumulative cultural evolution, and nonhuman culture. We then identify methodological advances that demonstrate the iterative improvement of cultural evolution experimental methods. Finally, we focus on one common critique of cultural evolution experiments, the appropriate individual learning control condition needed to demonstrate cumulative culture, and present an original experimental investigation relevant to this critique. Participants completed a combinatorial innovation task allowing for cumulative improvement over time in one of four commonly used experimental designs/conditions: social learners in chains, social learners in groups, individual learners experiencing an extended session lasting the same accumulated time as an entire chain or group, and individual learners experiencing repeated sessions adding up to the same total time. We found that repeated individual learning resulted in superior performance to any other condition. We discuss these findings in light of the relevance of the specific criticism of previous experimental studies that purport to have demonstrated cumulative culture. We also use our findings to discuss the broad trade-offs that participants face when learning individually and socially in different contexts, including variable acquisition costs, redundancy of effort in groups, and cognitive and motivational fatigue.
虽然文化进化现代领域的理论基础已经存在了 50 多年，但专门用于检验文化进化理论的实验室实验仅在过去二十年中才出现。在这里，我们回顾了文化进化领域中使用的主要实验设计，以及与文化变异的产生、基于内容和基于模型的偏差、累积文化进化和非人类文化相关的主要发现。然后，我们确定了一些方法上的进展，这些进展证明了文化进化实验方法的迭代改进。最后，我们关注文化进化实验的一个常见批评，即需要合适的个体学习对照条件来证明累积文化，并提出一个与这一批评相关的原始实验研究。参与者完成了一项组合创新任务，在四种常用的实验设计/条件中的一种中随着时间的推移实现累积改进：链式社会学习者、群体中的社会学习者、体验与整个链条或群体相同累积时间的扩展会话的个体学习者、以及体验累积到相同总时间的重复会话的个体学习者。我们发现，与声称已经证明了累积文化的先前实验研究的具体批评相比，重复个体学习产生了更好的结果。我们还根据参与者在不同情境下个体学习和社会学习所面临的广泛权衡，包括可变的习得成本、群体中努力的冗余以及认知和动机疲劳，讨论了这些发现。
