{"pk":29700,"title":"Downloading Culture.zip: Social learning by program induction","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Cumulative culture depends on the fidelity of learning be-tween successive generations, and the robustness with whichthe lessons of one generation apply to the problems of the next.How do humans accomplish these twin goals? We formalizesocial learning as a kind of program induction, and provide anexperimental test of a key prediction. To do this, we exploit akey fact: When humans learn from others, in addition to ob-serving inputs and outputs we often observe the process thatled to that output. For instance, when preparing a meal, wedon’t just observe a pile of vegetables and then a ratatouille.Instead, we observe a causal process that transforms those in-gredients into a finished food. Here, we use probabilistic pro-grams to represent causal processes and show that the observa-tion of an execution trace speeds up program induction, evenwhen learning from only a single example. This model pre-dicts that the inferences and behavior of people will be struc-tured by these execution traces. In two behavioral experiments,we show that human judgments and behavior are affected bythe execution trace in the systematic ways predicted by our for-mal model. These findings shed light on the mechanisms thatunderlie high fidelity social learning in humans, and unify therole of emulation and imitation in social learning.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"social learning; program induction; Bayesianmodeling; imitation learning; theory of mind"}],"section":"Poster Session 1","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/64t3g7qs","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Max","middle_name":"","last_name":"Kleiman-Weiner","name_suffix":"","institution":"Harvard University","department":""},{"first_name":"Felix","middle_name":"","last_name":"Sosa","name_suffix":"","institution":"Harvard University","department":""},{"first_name":"Bill","middle_name":"","last_name":"Thompson","name_suffix":"","institution":"Princeton University","department":""},{"first_name":"Bas","middle_name":"van","last_name":"Opheusden","name_suffix":"","institution":"Princeton University","department":""},{"first_name":"Thomas","middle_name":"L.","last_name":"Griffiths","name_suffix":"","institution":"Princeton University","department":""},{"first_name":"Samuel","middle_name":"","last_name":"Gershman","name_suffix":"","institution":"Harvard University","department":""},{"first_name":"Fiery","middle_name":"","last_name":"Cushman","name_suffix":"","institution":"Harvard University","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/29700/galley/19557/download/"}]}