{"pk":29454,"title":"The evolution of category systems within and between learners","subtitle":null,"abstract":"How do cumulative cultural evolution and individual learningdiffer? In an abstract computational sense, both are optimisa-tion processes that search a space of possible explanations andprevious work has identified deep parallels in the mathematicalmodels used to describe them (Suchow, Bourgin, & Griffiths,2017). However, there are obvious differences as well: forexample, individual learning involves a single agent charac-terised by one set of prior beliefs, representational capabilities,and so forth, while cultural evolution involves multiple agentswho may vary along these factors. We argue that this differ-ence implies that the process of cumulative cultural evolutionshould involve searching a more restricted set of hypothesesand converge on simpler ones. In two iterated category learn-ing experiments, we test this prediction and find that transmis-sion chains composed of single individuals, who learn basedon their previous performance, consider both a wider varietyand more complex categorisation schemas than do chains in-volving multiple people.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"cumulative cultural evo-lution; learning; complexity"},{"word":"categorisation"}],"section":"Categorization","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/66h2j82w","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Vanessa","middle_name":"","last_name":"Ferdinand","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Melbourne","department":""},{"first_name":"Amy","middle_name":"","last_name":"Perfors","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Melbourne","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2020-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/29454/galley/19314/download/"}]}