{"pk":28609,"title":"Inductive Biases Constrain Cumulative Cultural Evolution","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Cumulative cultural evolution is a distinctively human formof information-processing that endows our societies with im-probable and efficient technologies. But how objective is thisprocess? A widely held conjecture is that human cognitivebiases can constrain cumulative cultural evolution, and there-fore shape our discoveries. We present a Bayesian analysis ofa simple form of cumulative cultural evolution. This modelallows us to formulate and test the theoretical conjecture inan experimental setting. Across a series of behavioural ex-periments, we show that people’s inductive biases constrain apopulation’s ability to discover counter-intuitive virtual tech-nologies in a simple search problem. Our analysis highlightsformal relationships between cumulative cultural evolution,Bayesian inference, and stochastic optimization.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"cumulative cultural evolution; inductive biases;optimization; computation; Bayes; cultural evolution;"}],"section":"Papers with Oral Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/25w59934","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Bill","middle_name":"","last_name":"Thompson","name_suffix":"","institution":"Univeristy of California, Berkeley","department":""},{"first_name":"Thomas","middle_name":"L.","last_name":"Griffiths","name_suffix":"","institution":"Princeton 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/28609/galley/18480/download/"}]}