{"pk":27498,"title":"Probability matching as a cognitive basis of cultural drift","subtitle":null,"abstract":"In the field of cultural evolution, cognitive agents are either seen as perfect imitators who reproduce cultural variantsveridically (e.g. Boyd & Richerson 1985) or as imperfect imitators who transform the variants as they replicate them (e.g.Sperber 1996). In this poster, I explain how the transformative view of cognition applies to not only to the generation ofvariants, but also to the way we learn frequency distributions. Probability matching is a widely-observed human behaviorwhere learners reproduce a frequency distribution over variants with a small amount of error and is equivalent to Wright-Fisher drift when the variance in error is binomial/multinomial. However, humans and learning algorithms can produce errordistributions that are non-binomial/non-multinomial, which constitute a broader class of drift processes than those that exist ingenetic evolution or in perfect-imitator models of cultural evolution.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Posters: Member Abstracts","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9610g5pn","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Vanessa","middle_name":"","last_name":"Ferdinand","name_suffix":"","institution":"Santa Fe Institute","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/27498/galley/17134/download/"}]}