Cumulative culture in the laboratory: methodological and theoretical challenges

Abstract

In the last decade, cultural transmission experiments (transmission chains, replacement, closed groups and seeded groups) have become important experimental tools in investigating cultural evolution. However, these methods face important challenges, especially regarding the operationalization of theoretical claims. In this review, we focus on the study of cumulative cultural evolution, the process by which traditions are gradually modified and, for technological traditions in particular, improved upon over time. We identify several mismatches between theoretical definitions of cumulative culture and their implementation in cultural transmission experiments. We argue that observed performance increase can be the result of participants learning faster in a group context rather than effectively leading to a cumulative effect. We also show that in laboratory experiments, participants are asked to complete quite simple tasks, which can undermine the evidential value of the diagnostic criterion traditionally used for cumulative culture (i.e. that cumulative culture is a process that produces solutions that no single individual could have invented on their own). We show that the use of unidimensional metrics of cumulativeness drastically curtail the variation that may be observed, which raises specific issues in the interpretation of the experimental evidence. We suggest several solutions to these mismatches (learning times, task complexity and variation) and develop the use of design spaces in experimentally investigating old and new questions about cumulative culture.

Comparing Groups of Independent Solvers and Transmission Chains as Methods for Collective Problem-Solving

“…Our findings strengthen the connection between collective problem-solving and cumulative cultural evolution 56 . In addition to our main results, we find behavioural patterns similar to those that have been observed in cultural evolution research, such as the diminishing returns for larger group sizes 48 , the influence of diversity on group performance 49 and the impact of collective problem-solving methods on group success 44,57 .…”

“…In addition to our main results, we find behavioural patterns similar to those that have been observed in cultural evolution research, such as the diminishing returns for larger group sizes 48 , the influence of diversity on group performance 49 and the impact of collective problem-solving methods on group success 44,57 . Our results complement these findings by comparing the influence of different methods when controlling for the total number of search steps (as proposed by 56 ) and when systematically manipulating the individual's degrees of freedom as a proxy for the individual's skill.…”

The elephant in the room: What matters cognitively in cumulative technological culture

“…There are several problems with this argument. First, experimental investigations of CC rely on relatively simple tasks that participants can solve in a short period of time (Miton & Charbonneau 2018). As a result, the amount of information that individuals can typically extract from the observation of such simple experimental artifacts is unrealistically high and whether technical reasoning skills allow individuals to infer substantial amounts of missing information about more ecologically valid artifacts remains to be demonstrated.…”

Escaping optimization traps: the role of cultural adaptation and cultural exaptation in facilitating open-ended cumulative dynamics

“…One reason for this omission is the focus on specific types of cumulative culture. Debates over what constitutes cumulative culture, as well as questions over its presence in non-human animals, is the source of much consternation (for recent reviews, see Mesoudi and Thornton (2018); Miton and Charbonneau (2018)). Social transmission experiments, for instance, tend to investigate processes of functional refinement.…”