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The sharp distinction between biological traits and culturally based traits, which had long been standard in evolutionary approaches to behavior, was blurred in the early 1980s by mathematical models that allowed a co-dependent evolution of genetic transmission and cultural information. Niche-construction theory has since added another contrast to standard evolutionary theory, in that it views niche construction as a cause of evolutionary change rather than simply a product of selection. While offering a new understanding of the coevolution of genes, culture, and human behavior, niche-construction models also invoke multivariate causality, which require multiple time series to resolve. The empirical challenge lies in obtaining time-series data on causal pathways involved in the coevolution of genes, culture, and behavior. This is a significant issue in archeology, where time series are often sparse and causal behaviors are represented only by proxies in the material record.

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 648841 RATCHETCOG ERC‐2014‐CoG. Many human cultural traits become increasingly beneficial as they are repeatedly transmitted, thanks to an accumulation of modifications made by successive generations. But how do later generations typically avoid modifications which revert traits to less beneficial forms already sampled and rejected by earlier generations? And how can later generations do so without direct exposure to their predecessors' behavior? One possibility is that learners are sensitive to cues of non‐random production in others' behavior, and that particular variants (e.g., those containing structural regularities unlikely to occur spontaneously) have been produced deliberately and with some effort. If this non‐random behavior is attributed to an informed strategy, then the learner may infer that apparent avoidance of certain possibilities indicates that these have already been sampled and rejected. This could potentially prevent performance plateaus resulting from learners modifying inherited behaviors randomly. We test this hypothesis in four experiments in which participants, either individually or in interacting dyads, attempt to locate rewards in a search grid, guided by partial information about another individual's experience of the task. We find that in some contexts, valid inferences about another's behavior can be made from partial information, and these inferences can be used in a way which facilitates trait adaptation. However, the benefit of these inferences appears to be limited, and in many contexts—including some which have the potential to make inferring the experience of another individual easier—there appears to be no benefit at all. We suggest that inferring previous behavior from partial social information plays a minimal role in the adaptation of cultural traits. Publisher PDF

Children are sensitive to both social and non-social aspects of the learning environment. Among social cues, pedagogical communication has been shown to not only play a role in children's learning, but also in their own active transmission of knowledge. Vredenburgh, Kushnir and Casasola, Developmental Science, 2015, 18, 645 showed that 2-year-olds are more likely to demonstrate an action to a naive adult after learning it in a pedagogical than in a non-pedagogical context. This finding was interpreted as evidence that pedagogically transmitted information has a special status as culturally relevant. Here we test the limits of this claim by setting it in contrast with an explanation in which the relevance of information is the outcome of multiple interacting social (e.g., pedagogical demonstration) and non-social properties (e.g., action complexity). To test these competing hypotheses, we varied both pedagogical cues and action complexity in an information transmission paradigm with 2-year-old children. In Experiment 1, children preferentially transmitted simple non-pedagogically demonstrated actions over pedagogically demonstrated more complex actions. In Experiment 2, when both actions were matched for complexity, we found no evidence of preferential transmission of pedagogically demonstrated actions. We discuss possible reasons for the discrepancy between our results and previous literature showing an effect of pedagogical cues on cultural transmission, and conclude that our results are compatible with the view that pedagogical and other cues interact, but incompatible with the theory of a privileged role for pedagogical cues.

We consider a society with informed individuals (adults) and naive individuals (children). Adults are altruistic towards their own children and possess information that allows to better predict the behavior of other adults. Children benefit from adopting behaviors that conform to the social norm determined by aggregate adult behavior, but, lacking accurate information, have to rely on the observed behavior of their adult parent to infer the norm. We show that this causes a signaling distortion in adult behavior. Compared to the benchmark case of no signaling, parents have a higher propensity to adopt attitudes that encourage their children to behave in a socially safe way, i.e. the way which would be optimal under maximum uncertainty about the prevailing social norm. This distortion is different in nature from the typical distortion due to a conflict of interest between sender and receiver in standard signaling games. The norm-signaling bias is self-reinforcing and might lead both to (Pareto) superior and inferior outcomes relative to the case of no signaling. We discuss applications to sexual attitudes, collective reputation, and trust.

This paper argues that to better understand the relationship between a legal institution and moral conduct, two features of the legal institution need to be jointly considered: It is costly and endogenously determined. We propose a simple cultural transmission model in the context of a legal institution. The strength of the legal institution is determined by majority voting and the cost of implementing the legal institution is shared by the citizens. We find that the legal institution can either “crowd in” or “crowd out” moral conduct in the long run depending on the cost of implementation as well as the initial distribution of moral conduct in a society.

Why does musical rhythm have the structure it does? Musical rhythm, in all its cross-cultural diversity, exhibits commonalities across world cultures. Traditionally, music research has been split into two fields. Some scientists focused on musicality, namely the human biocognitive predispositions for music, with an emphasis on cross-cultural similarities. Other scholars investigated music, seen as a cultural product, focusing on the variation in world musical cultures. Recent experiments found deep connections between music and musicality, reconciling these opposing views. Here, we address the question of how individual cognitive biases affect the process of cultural evolution of music. Data from two experiments are analyzed using two complementary techniques. In the experiments, participants hear drumming patterns and imitate them. These patterns are then given to the same or another participant to imitate. The structure of these initially random patterns is tracked along experimental "generations." Frequentist statistics show how participants' biases are amplified by cultural transmission, making drumming patterns more structured. Structure is achieved faster in transmission within rather than between participants. A Bayesian model approximates the motif structures participants learned and created. Our data and models suggest that individual biases for musicality may shape the cultural transmission of musical rhythm.

From relative obscurity in the 1990s, hypnotherapy has become a major industry in contemporary Indonesia. This article examines its tremendous surge in popularity, and the subsequent trajectories of its vernacularization. It shows the hypnosis boom to have been underpinned by the introduction of a distinctive ‘thirty percent theory, seventy percent practice’ seminar format, structured in such a way as to allow mass-market consumers to experience themselves as hypnotically efficacious. With such efficacy proving unsustainable outside the seminar context, Indonesians reached for and developed alternative conceptions of ‘hypnosis’ that allowed them to continue as effective hypnotherapists. Such material demonstrates the value of incorporating a theory of interactional affordances into anthropological models of cultural transmission and globalization.

Is our cognition the underlying architecture of the recurrent and pan-cultural imaginative ideas of children and adolescents? Recent cross-cultural studies show that children and adolescents recall proportionally more creative, counterintuitive concepts than older adults. One outstanding concern is that cultural transmission is also constrained by how concepts emerge into culture. Hence, a broad sample of age demographics in UK and China (10–58 years; N = 90) participated in an exemplar-generation task where participants assembled statements exemplifying conceptual categories of positive and negative emotion, imagery, humor, and inferential potential. Multiple regression analysis considering counterintuitiveness and age revealed young persons generated significantly more imaginative, counterintuitive ideas than older adults, in both UK and China groups. This cross-cultural support for an underlying cognitive architecture of human creativity builds on Ward's (1994) research on structured imagination.

A spatially explicit, individual-based simulation model is used to study the spread of an allele for mate-choice copying (MCC) through horizontal cultural transmission when female innate preferences do or do not coevolve with a male viability-increasing trait. Evolution of MCC is unlikely when innate female preferences coevolve with the trait, as copier females cannot express a higher preference than noncopier females for high-fitness males. However, if a genetic polymorphism for innate preference persists in the population, MCC can evolve by indirect selection through hitchhiking: the copying allele hitchhikes on the male trait. MCC can be an adaptive behavior-that is, a behavior that increases a population's average fitness relative to populations without MCC-even though the copying allele itself may be neutral or mildly deleterious.

Social geography research on familial spaces and intimate relations has generated valuable literatures on parenting and grand-parenting in modern nuclear families. However, the complex intergenerational relations and geographies of multi-generational households remain under-researched, limiting geographers’ understanding of familial spatialities. This paper reports on research exploring intergenerational relationships through the lens of family-based food practices in temporary three-generational households of Guangzhou, the largest city in south China. It draws on five case studies with Xiaokang (middle-level) households. It examines how intergenerational relations are performed through everyday food practices, exploring their geographies in terms of both domestic space and wider family geographies. The key arguments suggest that domestic spaces are significant to cultural transmission and transition and emotional communication across generations, and key sites for intergenerational segregation and integration.

Group travel is a familiar phenomenon among birds but the causes of this mode of movement are often unclear. For example, flocking flight may reduce flight costs, enhance predator avoidance or increase foraging efficiency. In addition, naive individuals may also follow older, more experienced conspecifics as a learning strategy. However, younger birds may be slower than adults so biomechanical and social effects on flock structure may be difficult to separate. Gannets are wide-ranging (100s-1000s km) colonial seabirds that often travel in V or echelon-shaped flocks. Tracking suggests that breeding gannets use memory to return repeatedly to prey patches 10s–100s km wide but it is unclear how these are initially discovered. Public information gained at the colony or by following conspecifics has been hypothesised to play a role, especially during early life. Here, we address two hypotheses: (1) Flocking reduces flight costs and (2) young gannets follow older ones in order to locate prey. To do so, we recorded flocks of northern gannets commuting to and from a large colony and passing locations offshore and used a biomechanical model to test for age differences in flight speeds. Consistent with the aerodynamic hypothesis, returning flocks were significantly larger than departing flocks, while, consistent with the information gathering hypothesis, immatures travelled in flocks more frequently than adults and these flocks were more likely to be led by adults than expected by chance. Immatures did not systematically occupy the last position in flocks and had similar theoretical airspeeds to adults, making it unlikely that they follow, rather than lead, for biomechanical reasons. We therefore conclude that while gannets are likely to travel in flocks in part to reduce flight costs, the positions of immatures in those flocks may result in a flow of information from adults to immatures, potentially resulting in social learning.

Across the lifespan and across populations, humans 'overimitate' causally unnecessary behaviors. Such irrelevant-action imitation facilitates faithful cultural transmission, but its immediate benefits to the imitator are controversial. Over short time scales, irrelevant-action imitation may bootstrap artifact exploration or interpersonal affiliation, and over longer time scales it may facilitate acquisition of either causal models or social conventions. To investigate these putative functions, we recruited community samples from two under-studied populations: Yasawa, Fiji, and Huatasani, Peru. We use a two-action puzzle box: first after a video demonstration, and again one month later. Treating age as a continuous variable, we reveal divergent developmental trajectories across sites. Yasawans (44 adults, M = 39.9 years, 23 women; 42 children, M = 9.8 years, 26 girls) resemble documented patterns, with irrelevant-action imitation increasing across childhood and plateauing in adulthood. In contrast, Huatasaneños (48 adults, M = 37.6 years, 33 women; 47 children, M = 9.3 years, 13 girls) evince a parabolic trajectory: adults at the site show the lowest irrelevant-action imitation of any demographic set in our sample. In addition, all age sets in both populations reduce their irrelevant actions at Time 2, but do not reduce their relevant-action imitation or goal attainment. Taken together, and considering the local cultural contexts, our results suggest that irrelevant-action imitation serves a short-term function and is sensitive to the social context of the demonstration.

The colonisation of East Polynesia unfolded as a rapid dispersal by culturally related groups on a massive geographical scale. In settling distant oceanic islands, populations developed new technology in response to local environments, but also shared selectively neutral aspects of artefact design. Building on the work of Sinoto and Allen, we examine proximal endpoint line-attachment-devices (LADs) in fishhook assemblages from East Polynesia to address issues of interaction and cultural sharing among island communities. We construct relational networks using artefact classes and employ a series of non-parametric randomisation tests to directly evaluate the influence of geographical distribution on assemblage similarity in a time-averaged dataset. The results support a model of cultural transmission through social interaction largely irrespective of geographical distance. Our results show the degree of cultural relatedness among various fishhook assemblages, and we consider some implications for human migrations in East Polynesia.

This article uses children's work as a lens to examine methodological concerns in the study of cultural transmission. At present, scholars remain divided between two positions with regards to the processes of cultural transmission. The first perspective places the burden of skill acquisition on the child who “picks up” skills and ideas through exploration, observation, imitation, play, interaction with peers, participation with others in carrying out routine tasks, and other voluntary, self-initiated activities. A second position assigns great importance to parents as teachers who transmit essential skills and knowledge to their children. We illustrate that this debate may not be strictly empirical. Instead, these perspectives emerge from the contrasting methodologies that are largely associated with different disciplines: interviews in psychology and ethnography in anthropology. Drawing upon a review of the literature as well as a case study concerning the Asabano of Papua New Guinea, this article problematizes the sole reliance upon decontextualized self report data. Instead, we call for interviews to be situated within an ethnographic framework which not only involves observation, but also considers local models of cultural transmission, local communicative practices, and sociocultural change.

Item does not contain fulltext Cultural transmission is often viewed as a domain-general process. However, a growing literature suggests that learnability is influenced by content and context. The idea of a learnability landscape is introduced as a way of representing the effects of interacting factors on how easily information is acquired. Extending prior work (Barrett & Broesch, ), learnability of danger and other properties is compared for animals, artifacts, and foods in the urban American children (ages 4-5) and in the Shuar children in Ecuador (ages 4-9). There is an advantage for acquiring danger information that is strongest for animals and weakest for artifacts in both populations, with culture-specific variations. The potential of learnability landscapes for assessing biological and cultural influences on cultural transmission is discussed. 12 p.

The goal of this paper is to provoke debate about the nature of an iconic artifact—the Acheulean handaxe. Specifically, we want to initiate a conversationabout whether or not they are cultural objects. The vast majority of archeologistsassume that the behaviors involved in the production of handaxes wereacquired by social learning and that handaxes are therefore cultural. We willargue that this assumption is not warranted on the basis of the available evidenceand that an alternative hypothesis should be given serious consideration.This alternative hypothesis is that the form of Acheulean handaxes was at leastpartly under genetic control.

Predator-prey interactions have shaped our evolutionary lineage since long before we were human. Predation has had a profound influence on the evolution of our perceptual, emotional, cognitive, and social systems, stretching back to the origin of vertebrates. More recently, hunting has shaped the evolution of the hominin lineage, including the evolution of big brains, tool use, and cultural transmission in our genus. This chapter reviews the many influences predator-prey interactions have had on human psychology. A survey of the evolutionary history of predator-prey interactions in our lineage is followed by reviews of the influence of predator-prey interactions on various domains of human psychology including perception, foraging, emotions, learning, inference, and reasoning. The chapter concludes with suggestions for future research on the influence of predator-prey interactions on human psychology and behavior. Keywords: predation; hunting; foraging; emotions; learning; cognition; evolution

Assortative mating displays and/or preferences can be affected by learning across a wide range of animal taxa, but the specifics of how this learning affects speciation with gene flow are not well understood. We use population genetic models with trait learning to investigate how the identity of the tutor affects the divergence of a self-referent phenotype-matching trait. We find that oblique learning (learning from unrelated individual of the previous generation) and maternal learning mask sexual selection and therefore do not allow the maintenance of divergence. In contrast, by enhancing positive frequency-dependent sexual selection, paternal learning can maintain more divergence than genetic inheritance, but leads to the loss of polymorphism more easily. Furthermore, paternal learning inhibits the invasion of a novel self-referent phenotype-matching trait, especially in a large population.

Trust is the currency on which all human interactions are based. This entry reviews a diverse body of literature on the development of trust. We begin by describing foundational theories linking early experience to trust, and then discuss how violations of trust affect children. We turn next to a particularly active area of trust research in cognitive development—namely, trust in information learned from what other people say (testimony). Children's willingness to believe what they are told is essential for the cultural transmission of knowledge; it allows them to learn about things they have not experienced themselves. We describe research showing that, in fact, young children have a great deal of difficulty not believing testimony. We suggest that this credulity is the manifestation of a bias to trust testimony specifically rather than a more generic, undifferentiated trust, and speculate about the origins of this bias. Finally, we offer several suggestions of areas for future research, including whether children (like adults) make judgments of trustworthiness based on an individual's facial features, how culture influences trust and trustworthiness, and how children learn to evaluate the credibility of digital sources of information. Keywords: trust; children; development; testimony; attachment; cooperation; culture

Objective: The extent to which social organization of human societies impacts the patterns of genetic diversity remains an open question. Here, we investigate the transmission of reproductive success in patrilineal and cognatic populations from Central Asia using a coalescent approach. Methods: We performed a study on the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and Y chromosome polymorphism of patrilineal and cognatic populations from Central Asia. We reconstructed the gene genealogies in each population for both kind of markers and inferred the imbalance level of these genealogies, a parameter directly related to the level of transmission of reproductive success. Results: This imbalance level appeared much stronger for the Y chromosome in patrilineal populations than in cognatic populations, while no difference was found for mtDNA. Furthermore, we showed that this imbalance level correlates negatively with Y-chromosomal, mtDNA, and autosomal genetic diversity. Conclusions: This shows that patrilineality might be one of the factors explaining the male transmission of reproductive success, which, in turn, lead to a reduction of genetic diversity. Thus, notwithstanding the fact that our population genetic approach clearly shows that there is a strong male-biased transmission of reproductive success in patrilineal societies, it also highlights the fact that a social process such as cultural transmission of reproductive success could play an important role in shaping human genetic diversity, although we cannot formally exclude that this transmission has also a genetic component. Am J Phys Anthropol 157:537–543, 2015. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

A comparative examination of two groups of highly skilled Global North migrants – US citizens (Americans) in London, Berlin, and Paris and French citizens in London – this paper explores the nature of these migrants’ visits home, situating these visits between tourism and transnationalism. We question whether there has been a tendency to conceptualise visits home by migrants from the Global North as tourism and those from the Global South as transnational engagement. We found that our study participants’ visits home often incorporated visits to family, relaxation, tourism, and cultural transmission to children, suggesting there is not a clear distinction between tourism and transnationalism. At the same time, we noted a certain tension between transnationalism, here primarily familial obligations, and tourism, as migrants sought to balance a felt need to visit family and a desire to have some aspect of relaxation or tourism. Visits home also often necessitated negotiations of social relations – often in both home and host countries. Finally, we noted a bidirectionality in visits: migrants visited home, but family and friends visited them as well, which also serves to maintain social connections with home, suggesting that the implications of this bidirectionality for the nature of transnationalism are an area for future research.

Soga and Gaston (2018) recently outlined the features of shifting baseline syndrome (SBS; Pauly 1995), a condition whereby each new generation inherits an environment that has worsened from the generation before, producing lowered expectations for conservation and restoration. They showed some of the self‐reinforcing elements of SBS and provided four recommendations to help counter it: (1) restore the natural environment, (2) monitor and collect data, (3) reduce the extinction of experience, and (4) educate the public. I commend the authors for clearly articulating this syndrome and offering potential paths forward to correct it. Across a spectrum of environmental domains, SBS is pervasive, and many of its most pressing challenges are concentrated in remote sections of the Tropics and the Arctic, regions that to outsiders may appear relatively untouched by human activities. Here I argue that Indigenous knowledge (IK) has a strong role to play in limiting the shifting of baselines, especially in countering perceptions of these regions as pristine environments. IK, also referred to as traditional (ecological) knowledge, has been defined as “a cumulative body of knowledge, practice and belief, evolving by adaptive processes and handed down through generations by cultural transmission, about the relationship of living beings (including humans) with one another and with their environment” (Berkes 2008). Notably, IK has the potential to advance a narrative of past environmental conditions, an appropriate baseline against which to judge current state.

I establish a positive relationship between family ties and civic virtues, as captured by disapproval of tax and benefit cheating, corruption, and a range of other dimensions of exploiting others for personal gain. I find that family ties are a complement to social capital, using within country evidence from 83 nations and data on second generation immigrants in 29 countries with ancestry in 85 nations. Strong families cultivate universalist values and produce more civic and altruistic individuals. The results provide a constructive role for families in promoting family values, which challenge an ‘amoral familism.’ Moreover, strong families are complementary with more developed and democratic institutions. The results provide a constructive role for families in promoting family values that support successful societies with a high state and fiscal capacity.

Culture has become a critical concept for social psychology over the past quarter of a century. Yet, cultural dynamics, the process and mechanism of formation, maintenance, and transformation of culture, has begun to be investigated only recently. This article reports the current state of play of a research program that takes cultural dynamics as its central question. In this approach, humans are construed as meaning making animals that create, recreate, and exchange information, and turn it into a meaningful basis for action. The locus of meaning making and remaking is an everyday joint activity. The grounding model of cultural transmission describes how cultural information is deliberately or inadvertently transmitted in a joint activity. As we go about our business of living our daily lives, we ground information to our common ground, and construct a social reality that is mutually meaningful and yet only local. If locally grounded information is further generalized to a large collective and disseminated through social networks, repeated and iterative activations of the grounding process maintain the social reality of the collective that we take for granted. Implications of the grounding model of cultural transmission and future research directions are discussed. © 2014 Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd with the Asian Association of Social Psychology and the Japanese Group Dynamics Association.

The notion of animal culture has been well established mainly through research aiming at uncovering differences between populations. In chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus), cultural diversity has even been found in neighboring communities, where differences were observed despite frequent immigration of individuals. Female chimpanzees transfer at the onset of sexual maturity at an age, when the behavioral repertoire is fully formed. With immigrating females, behavioral variety enters the group. Little is known about the diversity and the longevity of cultural traits within a community. This study is building on previous findings of differences in hammer selection when nut cracking between neighboring communities despite similar ecological conditions. We now further investigated the diversity and maintenance of cultural traits within one chimpanzee community and were able to show high levels of uniformity in group-specific behavior. Fidelity to the behavior pattern did not vary between dispersing females and philopatric males. Furthermore, group-specific tool selection remained similar over a period of 25 years. Additionally, we present a study case on how one newly immigrant female progressively behaved more similar to her new group, suggesting that the high level of similarity in behavior is actively adopted by group members possibly even when originally expressing the behavior in another form. Taken together, our data support a cultural transmission process in adult chimpanzees, which leads to persisting cultural behavior of one community over time. Am. J. Primatol. 76:649–657, 2014. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Transmitted culture can be viewed as an inheritance system somewhat independent of genes that is subject to processes of descent with modification in its own right. Although many authors have conceptualized cultural change as a Darwinian process, there is no generally agreed formal framework for defining key concepts such as natural selection, fitness, relatedness and altruism for the cultural case. Here, we present and explore such a framework using the Price equation. Assuming an isolated, independently measurable culturally transmitted trait, we show that cultural natural selection maximizes cultural fitness, a distinct quantity from genetic fitness, and also that cultural relatedness and cultural altruism are not reducible to or necessarily related to their genetic counterparts. We show that antagonistic coevolution will occur between genes and culture whenever cultural fitness is not perfectly aligned with genetic fitness, as genetic selection will shape psychological mechanisms to avoid susceptibility to cultural traits that bear a genetic fitness cost. We discuss the difficulties with conceptualizing cultural change using the framework of evolutionary theory, the degree to which cultural evolution is autonomous from genetic evolution, and the extent to which cultural change should be seen as a Darwinian process. We argue that the nonselection components of evolutionary change are much more important for culture than for genes, and that this and other important differences from the genetic case mean that different approaches and emphases are needed for cultural than genetic processes.

The following study is part of a larger community-based project that began in 2007 to document Halq'emeylem language and cultural transmission among Elders, family members, and teachers in the Sto:lō First Nation located in Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada (MacDonald et al., 2010; MacDonald et al., 2011). Within the larger project, this article focuses on Halq'emeylem language and literacy transmission and the ways that literacy practices, including the creation of a Halq'emeylem orthography, and theories of school-based second language acquisition have influenced language revitalization within a British Columbia Aboriginal Head Start program. Using ethnographic methods and grounded theory, findings illustrate how a lack of teacher fluency has influenced the transmission of Halq'emeylem by creating the need to rely on a unique bi-/multiliteracy base where environmental print, translated names, translated songs, and interactive text-based computer games are used to support Halq'emeylem language development among parents and teachers who are jointly and concurrently learning and teaching their ancestral language. The study is anchored in a critical perspective on multilingualism (Creese & Blackledge, 2010) that moves away from ideologized beliefs that linguistic systems should be strictly separated, including within second language classrooms (Cummins, 2008; Ludi, 2003; Ludi & Py, 2009; Moore & Gajo, 2009; Swain & Lapkin, 2005). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information changes as it is passed from person to person, with this process of cultural transmission allowing the minds of individuals to shape the information that they transmit. We present mathematical models of cultural transmission which predict that the amount of information passed from person to person should affect the rate at which that information changes. We tested this prediction using a function-learning task, in which people learn a functional relationship between two variables by observing the values of those variables. We varied the total number of observations and the number of those observations that take unique values. We found an effect of the number of observations, with functions transmitted using fewer observations changing form more quickly. We did not find an effect of the number of unique observations, suggesting that noise in perception or memory may have affected learning.

This review highlights studies examining cultural differences in the mode of thought. The theoretical framework of studies from a cross-cultural perspective suggests that views of self, social norms, communication practices, and modes of thought are interconnected. The independent view of self, dominant in Western cultures, promotes low-contextual communication and corresponds to an analytic and logical mode of thought. On the other hand, the interdependent view of self, dominant in East Asian cultures, promotes high-contextual communication and corresponds to a holistic and dialectical mode of thought. The expected cultural variations of the mode of thought have been supported by empirical findings regarding causal attribution, attention, reasoning, categorization, and comprehension of utterances. Moreover, it has become clear that cultural knowledge of ideas and beliefs, which are activated by linguistic symbols and icons, guides the corresponding psychological tendencies including analytic and holistic modes of thought. Furthermore, studies of cultural neuroscience have shown cultural differences in behavioural as well as neural responses. A growing body of research supports cultural differences in the mode of thought; however, there is still much room for this research area to progress. Future directions suggesting further investigations in relation to socialization, cultural products, and gene–culture interaction are discussed.

Humans exhibit a rich and complex material culture with no equivalent in animals. Also, social learning, a crucial requirement for culture, is particularly developed in humans and provides a means to accumulate knowledge over time and to develop advanced technologies. However, the type of social learning required for the evolution of this complex material culture is still debated. Here, using a complex and opaque virtual task, the efficiency of individual learning and two types of social learning (product-copying and process-copying) were compared. We found that (1) individuals from process-copying groups outperformed individuals from product-copying groups or individual learners, whereas access to product information was not a sufficient condition for providing an advantage to social learners compared to individual learners; (2) social learning did not seem to affect the exploration of the fitness landscape; (3) social learning led to strong within-group convergence and also to between-group convergence, and (4) individuals used widely variable social learning strategies. The implications of these results for cumulative culture evolution are discussed.

Parents’ socialization goals are important for cultural transmission across generations, but whether such goals vary by ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds and change over children’s first years of life remains unexamined. In Study 1, African-American, Dominican immigrant, and Mexican immigrant mothers (N = 300) reported on the qualities deemed as desirable or undesirable when children were aged 1 month, 14 months, and 2 years. Mothers spontaneously referred to a common set of qualities, including achievement, self-maximization, proper demeanor, and connectedness. Most mothers emphasized achievement (desirable qualities) and disapproved of improper demeanor (undesirable qualities). Desirable qualities varied by age and socioeconomic factors more than did undesirable qualities. Mothers (N = 185) were followed up in Study 2 when children were aged three years, and ranked 21 qualities using a Q-sort instrument. Ethnic differences were revealed at this more specific level, with Latina mothers being more similar in their rankings than African-American mothers.

Infants imitate others’ individual actions, but do they also replicate others’ joint activities? To examine whether observing joint action influences infants’ initiation of joint action, forty-eight 18-month-old infants observed object demonstrations by 2 models acting together (joint action), 2 models acting individually (individual action), or 1 model acting alone (solitary action). Infants’ behavior was examined after they were given each object. Infants in the joint action condition attempted to initiate joint action more often than infants in the other conditions, yet they were equally likely to communicate for other reasons and to imitate the demonstrated object-directed actions. The findings suggest that infants learn to replicate others’ joint activity through observation, an important skill for cultural transmission of shared practices.

Summary 1. Antagonistic interactions have been favourite subjects of studies on species co-evolution, because coexistence among competing species often results in quantifiable character displacement. A common output for competitive interactions is trait divergence, although the opposite phenomenon, convergence, has been proposed to evolve in some instances, for example in the communication behaviour of species that maintain mutually exclusive territories. 2. I use here experimental and observational evidence to study how species interactions drive heterospecific signal convergence and analyse how convergence feeds back to the interaction itself, in the form of aggressive behaviour. I recorded the learned territorial signals of two non-hybridizing larks, Galerida cristata and G. theklae, and used allopatric populations as controls for evaluating acoustic convergence in syntopy. Acoustic variation was analysed with respect to social conditions controlling for other potential agents of natural selection, habitat and climate. 3. Interspecific convergence of Galerida calls peaked in syntopy. Although call acoustic structure was affected by climate and habitat, it matched gradients of density and proximity to congeners even at small local scales. The process of cultural transmission, in which individuals may acquire components of behaviour by copying neighbours, enhances the correlation between call acoustics and the local social milieu. 4. Territories were defended against both species, but playback stimuli of convergent congener calls elicited a stronger aggressive reaction than congener calls from allopatric locations. 5. This study shows that learned behaviours may co-evolve as a consequence of antagonistic interactions, determining reciprocal cultural evolution or cultural co-evolution. As for (biological) co-evolution, the distribution of competing species influences whether a particular area becomes a syntopic environment in which convergence is occurring, or an allopatric environment lacking interactions and reciprocal change. Because of their plastic nature, cultural coadaptations may rapidly shift in response to fluctuating social selection, thus propelling dynamic interactions and fine adjustments to the local environment.

The evolutionary foundations of helping among nonkin in humans have been the object of intense debates in the past decades. One thesis has had a prominent influence in this debate: the suggestion that genuine altruism, strictly defined as a form of help that comes at a net fitness cost for the benefactor, might have evolved owing to cultural transmission. The gene‐ culture coevolution literature is wont to claim that cultural evolution changes the selective pressures that normally act to limit the emergence of altruistic behaviours. This paper aims to recall, however, that cultural transmission yields altruism only to the extent that it relies on maladaptive mechanisms, such as conformist imitation and (in some cases) payoff-biased transmission. This point is sometimes obscured in the literature by a confusion between genuine altruism, maladaptive by definition, and mutualistic forms of cooperation, that benefit all parties in the long run. Theories of cultural altruism do not lift the selective pressures weighing on strictly altruistic actions; they merely shift the burden of maladaptation from social cognition to cultural transmission.

One of the most fascinating questions within the field of sexual selection is why and how females and males choose particular conspecifics as mates. Sexual selection theories provide different explanations for the origin and evolution of ornamental traits and mate preferences for such traits (overview in Andersson 1994; Jennions et al. 2001; Kokko et al. 2003). Genes for the ornamental trait and genes for the concomitant preference can co-evolve as a result of a genetic linkage between those genes as a result of the Fisherian runaway process (Fisher 1930; Lande 1981; Kirkpatrick 1982; Brooks 2000) or as a result of a selection for mates advertising ‘good genes’ (indicator models; Zahavi 1975; Moller & Alatalo 1999). These models generally assume that mate preferences are genetically based (Bakker 1999). Forming mate preferences, however, is a complex process involving not only genetic factors but also non-genetic factors. Increasing evidence suggests that the social environment (Dugatkin 1996a; Westneat et al. 2000) and learning are important factors in forming mate preferences. The mate choice of conspecifics influences the mate choice decisions of an individual, who can alter mate preferences through learning processes. Social learning, and using public information (Danchin et al. 2004; and see Chapter 10) and other kinds of learning, therefore, significantly influence the process of sexual selection. Forms of social learning have now been recognized as meaningful mechanisms for the non-genetic inheritance (i.e. cultural transmission) of mate preferences, leading to cultural evolution of mate preferences. This chapter illustrates how learning is involved in the mate choices of fishes and emphasizes the important roles that different kinds of learning, particularly social learning, play in sexual selection. It focuses on four different kinds of learning: sexual imprinting; learning after reaching maturity; eavesdropping; and mate-choice copying.

Recent research has revealed a striking tendency in young children to imitate even causally irrelevant actions, a phenomenon dubbed 'over-imitation'. To investigate whether children develop beyond this, we allowed both adults and children to witness either a child or adult model performing goal-relevant and goal-irrelevant actions to extract a reward from a transparent puzzle box. Surprisingly, copying of irrelevant actions increased with age, with the adults performing the task with less efficiency than the children. Participants of all ages were more likely to perform the irrelevant actions performed by an adult model, than by a child model. These results suggest that people may become more imitative as they mature, whilst selectively copying particular models with a high level of fidelity. We suggest that this combination of faithful copying and selectivity underwrites the powerful social learning necessary for the level of cultural transmission on which our species depends.

The global digital divide threatens to exclude millions of people from the potential benefits of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), especially computers and the Internet. Many of these people live in rural, isolated and remote places of developing countries and are unlikely to be able to afford the cost of owning their own computers. However, NGOs, international aid agencies and governments are becoming increasingly aware of the potential that ICTs offer for rural development and poverty reduction and are creating more opportunities for providing wider access to them. This paper looks at how ICTs have contributed to the social development of a rural indigenous ethnic community. It focuses on the benefits of ICTs in recording and passing on their unique culture and traditions, something that is of considerable importance to the community. The research builds an understanding of the nature of cultural transmission within an indigenous community in East Malaysia and demonstrates how ICTs can bridge the digital divide by accentuating the importance of family, friends and other social interactions within a community in strengthening the processes of cultural transmission. Based on the findings, suggestions are offered for reinforcing social processes of cultural transmission with ICTs, in the form of a virtual museum and a community radio station.

Cultural transmission is thought to be a mechanism by which migratory animals settle into habitats, but little evidence exists in wild populations because of the difficulty of following individuals over successive generations and wide geographical distances. Cultural inheritance of migration routes represents a mechanism whereby geographical isolation can arise between separate groups and could constrain individuals to potentially suboptimal sites within their range. Conversely, adopting the parental migratory route in adult life, rather than dispersing randomly, may increase an individual’s reproductive success because that strategy has already been proven to allow successful breeding. We combined a pedigree of related light-bellied Brent geese (Branta bernicla hrota) with 6 years of observations of marked birds to calculate the dispersal distances of adult offspring from their parents in both Ireland and Iceland. In both countries, the majority of offspring were found to recruit into or near their parental sites, indicating migratory connectivity in the flyway. Despite this kin structure, we found no evidence of genetic differentiation using genotype data from 1127 individuals across 15 microsatellite loci. We suggest that the existence of migratory connectivity of subpopulations is far more common than previous research indicates and that cultural information may play an important role in structuring reproductive isolation among them.

Evolutionary approaches to culture remain contentious. A source of contention is that cultural mutation may be substantial and, if it drives cultural change, then current evolutionary models are not adequate. But we lack studies quantifying the contribution of mutations to directional cultural change. We estimated the contribution of one type of cultural mutations--modification of memes--to directional cultural change using an amenable study system: learned birdsongs in a species that recently entered an urban habitat. Many songbirds have higher minimum song frequency in cities, to alleviate masking by low-frequency noise. We estimated that the input of meme modifications in an urban songbird population explains about half the extent of the population divergence in song frequency. This contribution of cultural mutations is large, but insufficient to explain the entire population divergence. The remaining divergence is due to selection of memes or creation of new memes. We conclude that the input of cultural mutations can be quantitatively important, unlike in genetic evolution, and that it operates together with other mechanisms of cultural evolution. For this and other traits, in which the input of cultural mutations might be important, quantitative studies of cultural mutation are necessary to calibrate realistic models of cultural evolution.

This article chronicles how the ideas of neo-Weberians, Marxists, feminists, and critical race thinkers have merged to create a new cultural production or class culture paradigm of schooling. Reviews of recent ethnographic work illustrates how the articulations among class, race, gender, and sexual identity practices in schools are studied without privileging one standpoint over another. This paradigm shift signals the demise of earlier cultural transmissions and modernization paradigms in the field. [class culture theory, cultural production, articulations, cultural transmission]

When individuals in a population can acquire traits through learning, each individual may express a certain number of distinct cultural traits. These traits may have been either invented by the individual himself or acquired from others in the population. Here, we develop a game theoretic model for the accumulation of cultural traits through individual and social learning. We explore how the rates of innovation, decay, and transmission of cultural traits affect the evolutionary stable (ES) levels of individual and social learning and the number of cultural traits expressed by an individual when cultural dynamics are at a steady-state. We explore the evolution of these phenotypes in both panmictic and structured population settings. Our results suggest that in panmictic populations, the ES level of learning and number of traits tend to be independent of the social transmission rate of cultural traits and is mainly affected by the innovation and decay rates. By contrast, in structured populations, where interactions occur between relatives, the ES level of learning and the number of traits per individual can be increased (relative to the panmictic case) and may then markedly depend on the transmission rate of cultural traits. This suggests that kin selection may be one additional solution to Rogers's paradox of nonadaptive culture.

In this study I aim to develop a sociological understanding of why certain techniques of cultural transmission are more easily accepted in some societies than in others. With this aim in mind, I present a comparative analysis of the contrasting approaches to music education in Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire. While, as a major technique of cultural transmission music notation found relatively widespread acceptance in Western Europe at least since the eleventh century onwards, most musicians in the Ottoman Empire resisted its adoption until the end of the nineteenth century. The analysis focuses on the ways in which the choices of Ottoman and West European musicians interacted with broader social and political processes in the two societies. In the light of this analysis, it is suggested that technologies used in cultural transmission can be seen as parts of a broader assemblage and their rejection or acceptance can be conditioned by a series of socio-political concerns.

The study of civic activity has become a central focus for many social scientists over the past decade, generating considerable research and debate. Previous studies have largely overlooked the role of youth socialization into civic life, most notably in the settings of home and school. Further, differences along gender lines in civic capacity have not been given sufficient attention in past studies. This study adds to the literature by examining the potential pathways in the development of youth civic activity and potential, utilizing both gender-neutral and gender-specific structural equation modeling of data from the 1996 National Household Education Survey. Results indicate that involvement by parents in their child's schooling plays a crucial, mediating role in the relationship between adult and youth civic activity. Gender differences are minimal; thus adult school involvement is crucial for transmitting civic culture from parents to both female and male youth.

The “Cultural Transmission Hypothesis” and the “Alerting Others Hypothesis” of enemy recognition in birds was examined in mobbing experiments with captive blackbirds. Observer birds learned to mob a novel non-raptorial bird more strongly as a consequence of witnessing another bird mob strongly at the site of presentation. Strength of the observer's enhanced response was comparable to that elicited by a genuine predator. Under identical conditions, observers were also tutored to mob an unnatural, similar-sized object more strongly than initially but less intensely than to the novel bird after conditioning. Habituation to the novel bird did not impair subsequent conditioning. Cultural Transmission was effective along a “chain” of at least six birds. The phenomenon is discussed in terms of selfish benefits, kin selection and blackbird dispersal.

The present study analyses the capacity of house mice (Mus musculus) to solve a problem, consisting in opening a door which must be rotated 50 times in the same direction to allow access to the food reward. This capacity emerged spontaneously in 4.8 % of 500 animals belonging to a random bred Swiss population, tested beforehand. The experiment then investigated the effects of genetic and experiential (social) factors on transmission of this capacity from one individual to another. Five groups of approximately 70 animals each were compared: a) controls; b) animals with no experience of the problem but offspring of parents able to solve the problem spontaneously; c) animals with experience of the problem being offspring of parents able to solve it spontaneously; d) naive offspring of parents incapable of solving the problem spontaneously; e) animals with experience of the problem and offspring of parents incapable of solving it. The results showed considerable effects both of genetic and experiential (social) factors with values ranging from only 3.9 % of successful naive mice among offspring of unsuccessful individuals, up to 32.3 % of successful offspring of successful parents, reared with a mother who solved the problem several times in their presence.

The Everyday Lives of Young Children: Culture, Class, and Child Rearing in Diverse Societies. Jonathan Tudge. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2008. 328 pp. ISBN 9780521803847. $85.00 (cloth). Anthropologists have a long tradition of immersing readers in the flavors and textures of various cultures through detailed accounts of their time spent observing, listening, and talking to family members all over the world. Jonathan Tudge's The Everyday Lives of Young Children: Culture, Class, and Child Rearing in Diverse Societies (2008) is a nod to this tradition, though, as a developmental psychologist, Tudge introduces some interesting bifurcations from traditional approaches to studying culture. First, the family members at the center of Tudge's research are generally shorter, more prone to napping, and less inhibited than the typical subjects of ethnographic work. Thus insights into cultural values, beliefs, and practices are granted by a dedicated focus on how young children are socialized into a given society's ways of being and doing. Tudge takes us one step further by considering how young children themselves shape and change their own cultures. This is a brilliant departure from classic studies of "cultural transmission" that frame children as culture bearers. Second, the cultural-ecological theory guiding Tudge's research, and inspired by Vygotsky and Bronfenbrenner, brings many layers of analysis, including psychological, sociological, historical, and anthropological. This multiplicity of lenses is one of the primary characteristics that makes Tudge's work stand out among studies of young children and marks the book as a breakthrough contribution. The multidisciplinary nature of the work also invites readers to consider culture (what it is, what it means for our lives, how it changes) in all of its complexity and fluidity, and presents interesting possibilities for studying education, urbanicity, and childrearing as shaped by - and as they shape - culture. Third, this work pushes the boundaries of research typically classified as "cross-cultural" by spotlighting children in urban settings around the world and by including comparisons not only across societies but also within societies (Cohen, 2009). Traditionally, when children in the ' 'majority world' ' - a term for nonindustrialized countries Tudge borrows from Kagitccibasi (1996) - are studied, the subjects are from rural communities. This contributes to the predominant impression among members of the industrialized (minority) world that "rural" is a concomitant of non- Western societies. In contrast, Tudge's research was conducted in seven cities similar in one or more ways to Greensboro, North Carolina, United States, where the study began. They include Obninsk, Russia; Tartu, Estonia; OuIu, Finland; Suwon, South Korea; Kisumu, Kenya; and Porto Alegre, Brazil. Besides Kenya and to some extent Brazil, these countries are not part of the usual lineup in comparative studies, as the objective of many such studies is to contrast societies perceived to be radically different from one another (Hallpike, 2004). In addition, traditional crosscultural studies comparing majority- world rural societies with minority-world industrialized urban ones tend to conflate societal differences with social class differences. By including middle- and working-class participants in his study, Tudge is able to engage within-society comparisons. Further, the Greensboro site also includes two ethnic groups, White and Black, allowing for within-society comparisons across ethnicity and attention to the intersections of culture, class, and ethnicity (Tudge & Putnam, 1997). Tudge accomplishes these sophisticated contributions in nine well-organized chapters. In Chapter 1, Tudge sets the backdrop for the research presented in the book and provides an overview of approaches to studying children from three disciplines - developmental psychology, sociology, and anthropology. …

The last few decades of postcolonial, national, and transnational studies make it possible to do fuller justice to the layered histories that have shaped literature's circulation. Recent historical work on the medieval period through the 18th century establishes that both inter-imperial jockeying and anti-colonial resistance have shaped literature as it travels. Historians' accounts of these interconnected histories enable us to construct a transnational ‘histoire croisee’ with a highly dialectical accent. Building on this scholarship, this essay first of all foregrounds the interactive co-production of modern empires, including Ottoman and European empires. It then surveys some of the complex histories of cultural transmission by which Ottoman, Asian, and African cultures have formed ‘the West’ at its cultural foundations, whether through modeling ‘public sphere’ spaces, such as coffeehouses or western philosophers' study of Asian ideals of ‘organic’ esthetic form and political ethics. The essay then closes with a brief consideration of global modernisms in the light of this long history, highlighting new scholarship that moves toward the dialectical methodology conceptualized here.