{"pk":28591,"title":"Cumulative cultural evolution in a non-copying taskin children and Guinea baboons","subtitle":null,"abstract":"The unique cumulative nature of human culture has often beenexplained by high-fidelity copying mechanisms found only inhuman social learning. However, transmission chain exper-iments in human and non-human primates suggest that cu-mulative cultural evolution (CCE) might not be dependent onhigh-fidelity copying after all. In this study we test whetherCCE is possible even with a non-copying task. We performedtransmission chain experiments in Guinea baboons and chil-dren where individuals observed and reproduced visual pat-terns on touch screen devices. In order to be rewarded, par-ticipants had to avoid touching squares that were touched bya previous participant. In other words, they were regardedfor innovation rather than copying. Results nevertheless ex-hibited two fundamental properties of CCE: an increase overgenerations in task performance and the emergence of sys-tematic structure. However, CCE arose from different mecha-nisms across species: children, unlike baboons, converged inbehaviour over generations by copying specific patterns in adifferent location, thus introducing alternative copying mech-anisms into the non-copying task. We conclude that CCE canresult from non-copying tasks and that there is a broad spec-trum of possible mechanisms that will lead to CCE aside fromhigh-fidelity transmission.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"social learning; transmission chain; copyin"}],"section":"Papers with Oral Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2n7721xt","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Carmen","middle_name":"","last_name":"Saldana","name_suffix":"","institution":"The University of Edinburgh","department":""},{"first_name":"Jo ̈el","middle_name":"","last_name":"Fagot","name_suffix":"","institution":"Aix-Marseille University,","department":""},{"first_name":"Simon","middle_name":"","last_name":"Kirby","name_suffix":"","institution":"The University of Edinburgh","department":""},{"first_name":"Kenny","middle_name":"","last_name":"Smith","name_suffix":"","institution":"The University of Edinburgh","department":""},{"first_name":"Nicolas","middle_name":"","last_name":"Claidi`ere","name_suffix":"","institution":"Aix-Marseille University,","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2019-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28591/galley/18462/download/"}]}