Compression in cultural evolution: Homogeneity and structure in the emergence and evolution of a large-scale online collaborative art project

Müller, Thomas; Winters, James

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0202019

Cited by 13 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 38 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Our work add to a list of notable Internet performances, including Reddit Place and Twitch Plays Pokémon, which highlighted how intelligent goal-oriented behavior, typical of higher cognitive functions, can emerge in a decentralized manner from distributed social systems [1,11]. At the same time, our work employs a real-time democratic consensus system based on language, instead of simpler local aggregation rules typically used in other Internet performances.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Real-time Internet Control of Situated Human Agents

Pescetelli

Cebrián

Rahwan

2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We present an online platform, called BeeMe, designed to test the current boundaries of Internet collective action and problem solving.BeeMe allows a scalable internet crowd of online users to collectively control the actions of a human surrogate acting in physical space.BeeMe demonstrates how intelligent goal-oriented decision-making can emerge from large crowds in quasi real-time. We analyzed data collected from a global BeeMe live performance that involved thousands of individuals, collectively solving a sci-fi Internet mystery. We study simple heuristic algorithms that read in users' chat messages and output human actionable commands representing majority preferences, and compare their performance to the behavior of a human operator solving the same task. Results show that simple heuristics can achieve near-human performance in interpreting the democratic consensus. When human and machine's output differ, the discrepancy is often due to human bias favoring non-representative views. We discuss our results in light of previous work and the contemporary debate on democratic digital systems.Humans are extreme cooperators [18,20]. The evolution of language allowed our species to coordinate actions, thoughts and intentions. Contrary to other social species -like eusocial insects and other primates -humans cooperate in large-scale societies of largely non-related individuals [4,6,8]. The increasing returns of group scale, evident for instance in warfare, big game hunting, or tax collection, has put pressure on humans to develop norms and institutions that allow increasingly larger social groups to cooperate and act together [3,21,22]. Social norms and institutionsdefined as the set of culturally acquired rules governing the behavior of individuals in specific contexts [21]-are considered solutions to the collective action problem, arising when selfish instincts must be suppressed in favor of higher group payoffs [8,13,17]. Religion and political states are thought to have provided a range of innovations-like moralizing gods, policing and representative hierarchies -that maintain fairness, punish non-cooperators and increase

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Real-time Internet Control of Situated Human Agents

Pescetelli

Cebrián

Rahwan

2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Youngblood (2019) tracked the spread of music samples among hip-hop and electronic producers and showed that, thanks to digital sampling technologies, their networks of collaborations are no longer constrained by geographical proximity. Müller & Winters (2018) analysed the evolution of Reddit Place, a social media experiment in which any registered user could place a single coloured pixel on a 1,000 x 1,000 pixels online digital canvas every 5 to 20 minutes for three days. The project involved 1 million individuals that placed more than million pixels.…”

Section: Digital Cumulative Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

Digital culture

Acerbi¹

2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Cultural evolution can provide a useful framework to understand how information is produced, transmitted, and selected in contemporary online, digital, media. The diffusion of digital technologies triggered a radical departure from previous modalities of cultural transmission but, at the same time, general characteristics of human cultural evolution and cognition influence these developments. In this chapter, I will explore some areas where the links between cultural evolution research and digital media seem more promising. As cultural evolution-inspired research on internet phenomena is still in its infancy, these areas represent suggestions and links with works in other disciplines more than reviews of past research in cultural evolution. These include topics such as how to characterise the online effects of social influence and the spread of information; the possibility that digital, online, media could enhance cumulative culture; and the differences between online and offline cultural transmission. In the last section I will consider other possible future directions: the influences of different affordances in different media supporting cultural transmission; the role of producers of cultural traits; and, finally, some considerations on the effects on cultural dynamics of algorithms selecting information.

show abstract

“…On the other hand, despite its undisputed special status, language is no longer seen as the "odd one out" among our cognitive and cultural traits. Instead, an integrative view sees language as bearing important commonalities with other phenomena, which is why phenomena as different as the construction of paper airplanes (Caldwell & Millen 2008), the evolution of a collaborative art project (Müller & Winters 2018), diachronic changes in ancient coin designs (Pavlek, Winters & Morin 2019), and the evolution of language(s) can be investigated in a shared theoretical framework. The 2016 founding of the Cultural Evolution Society bears witness to the appeal of such an integrative approach to language, cognition, and culture.…”

Section: An Integrative Approach To Language Dynamicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Language Adapts to the Environment: An Evolutionary, Experimental Approach

Nölle¹

2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The aim of this thesis is to investigate experimentally whether cross-linguistic variation in the structure of languages can be motivated by their external environment. It has been sug-gested that variation does not only result from cultural drift and language-internal mecha-nisms but also from social or even physical factors. However, from observational data and correlations between variables alone, it remains difficult to infer the exact underlying mech-anisms. Here, I present a novel experimental approach for studying the relationship between language and environment under controlled laboratory conditions. I argue that to arrive at a causal understanding of linguistic adaptation, we can use a cultural evolutionary approach and simulate the emergence of linguistic structure with humans in the lab. This way, it can be tested which pressures shape linguistic features as they are used for communication and transmitted to new speakers. I focus primarily on cases where linguistic conventions emerge in referential communication games in direct face-to-face interaction. In these set-tings, I test whether specific conventions are more adaptive to solve the same problem un-der different conditions or affordances imposed by the environment. A series of silent-gesture experiments shows that systematicity (the design feature giving language its com-positional power) is sensitive to the communicative environment: Dyads creating novel ges-tural communication systems to communicate pictorial referents are more likely to system-atize traits and create categories that are functionally relevant in the given environment. Ad-ditionally, environmental features, such as the size of the meaning space and visibility of referents, affect the degree to which participants rely on systematic rather than simple ho-listic gestures. This ‘experimental semiotics’ approach thus models how environmental fac-tors could motivate basic linguistic structure.However, for complex real-world phenomena, such as the hotly debated relationship between spatial language and environment, it is difficult to design simple experiments that isolate variables of interest but retain the necessary level of realism. It has been proposed that topography (e.g., landmarks like rivers, slopes) and sociocultural factors (e.g., bilingual-ism, subsistence style, population density) can affect whether speakers rely on an egocentric or geocentric Frame of Reference (FoR) to encode spatial relations, but it remains hard to disentangle the exact contribution of these variables to the cross-linguistic variation we ob-serve.I tackle this issue with a novel paradigm: interactive Virtual Reality (VR) experiments that allow for an unprecedented combination of ecological validity and experimental con-trol. In networked VR settings, participants are immersed in realistic settings such as a for-est or a mountain slope. By having dyads solve spatial coordination games, I show that speakers of English, which is usually associated with an egocentric FoR, are less likely to use egocentric language (e.g., “the orb is to your left”) if there are strong environmental af-fordances that make geocentric language more viable (e.g., “the orb is uphill from you”). Further experiments address whether the cultural ‘success’ of egocentric left/right could be motivated by its applicability across environments. For this, I combine VR with the ‘exper-imental semiotics’ approach, where the game is solved via a novel visual communication channel. I show how the movement data in the 3D world can be correlated with invented signals to measure which FoR participants rely on. In contrast to the English data, I did not find an advantage for geocentric systems in the slope environment, and overwhelmingly egocentric systems emerged. I discuss how this could relate to task-specificity and native language background. More generally, I show how this new way of studying spatial lan-guage with interactive VR games can be used to test hypotheses about linguistic transmis-sion and material culture that could help explain the origins of the egocentric FoR system, which is regarded a fairly recent cultural innovation.Taken together, the thesis comprises several studies testing the relationship between linguistic and environmental variables. Additionally, VR is presented as a novel tool to study spatial language in controlled large-scale settings complementing more traditional fieldwork. More generally, I suggest that VR can be used to study the evolution of language in complex, multimodal settings without sacrificing experimental control.

show abstract

Compression in cultural evolution: Homogeneity and structure in the emergence and evolution of a large-scale online collaborative art project

Cited by 13 publications

References 38 publications

Real-time Internet Control of Situated Human Agents

Real-time Internet Control of Situated Human Agents

Digital culture

How Language Adapts to the Environment: An Evolutionary, Experimental Approach

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About