{"pk":27650,"title":"Computational Foundations of Cultural Evolution: Modeling the Emergence ofSystems from Higher-order Probabilistic Inference","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Cumulative cultural evolution in humans is the process through which behaviours gain structure and complexityas they are transmitted from one generation of learners to the next. A central challenge in the cultural evolution literatureis to understand how the unique computational principles of human cognition scaffold the emergence of complex behaviouralsystems. I explore how the human ability to make inferences at higher order levels of abstraction can lead to cultural complexity,in two ways: by allowing initially independent behaviours to gradually acquire group-like structure as new learners repeatedlyimpose an expectation for statistical dependence; and by allowing inferences in one domain to be rapidly transferred to newdomains which share features at higher-order levels of abstraction. I model these processes in populations using a probabilisticcognitive model for the acquisition of vowel systems in human language.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Posters: Member Abstracts","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8d95d9tx","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Bill","middle_name":"","last_name":"Thompson","name_suffix":"","institution":"Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics","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/27650/galley/17286/download/"}]}