{"pk":26941,"title":"When extremists win: On the behavior of iterated learning chains when priors areheterogeneous","subtitle":null,"abstract":"How does the process of information transmission affect thecultural products that emerge from that process? This questionis often studied experimentally and computationally via iter-ated learning, in which participants learn from previous partic-ipants in a chain. Much research in this area builds on math-ematical analyses suggesting that iterated learning chains con-verge to people’s priors. We present three simulation studiessuggesting that when the population of learners is heteroge-neous, the behavior of the chain is systematically distorted bythe learners with the most extreme biases. We discuss implica-tions for the use of iterated learning as a methodological tooland for the processes that might have shaped cultural productsin the real world.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Iterated learning; language evolution; culturalevolution; inductive biases; Bayesian cognition"}],"section":"Talks: Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6n1706tg","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Daniel","middle_name":"J.","last_name":"Navarro","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of New South Wales","department":""},{"first_name":"Amy","middle_name":"","last_name":"Perfors","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Adelaide","department":""},{"first_name":"Arthur","middle_name":"","last_name":"Kary","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of New South Wales","department":""},{"first_name":"Scott","middle_name":"","last_name":"Brown","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Newcastle","department":""},{"first_name":"Chris","middle_name":"","last_name":"Donkin","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of New South Wales","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2017-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26941/galley/16577/download/"}]}