The Emergence of Cultural Attractors: How Dynamic Populations of Learners Achieve Collective Cognitive Alignment

Abstract

Cultural attractor landscapes describe the time-evolution of cultural variants (i.e. behaviors, artifacts) over successive transmission events. Because cultural attractors are emergent products of dynamic populations of \textit{cognitive} landscapes, which are in turn emergent products of individual experience within a culture, stable cultural attractor landscapes cannot be taken for granted. Yet, little is known about how cultural attractors form, change, or stabilize. We present an agent-based model of cultural attractor dynamics, which adapts a cognitive model of unsupervised category learning to a multi-agent sociocultural setting wherein individual learners provide the training input to each other. We highlight three interesting behaviors exhibited by our model that are not accounted for in other models of cultural evolution: First, we find that some noise is beneficial to stabilizing cognitive alignment. Second, we find that long learning times may destabilize and limit the complexity of cultural repertoires, while critical or sensitive periods of learning enhance stability. Third, we find that larger populations develop less complex, but more stable patterns of alignment, and that this effect can be moderated by network structure. These results suggest that additional complexity may be needed in models of cultural evolution to adequately understand how human-level culture develops.

Cognitive Science Progresses Toward Interactive Frameworks

“…Some have even suggested that conscious experience itself emerges between an organism and its environment (O'Regan & Noë, 2001) and even between multiple organisms (Kirchhoff & Kiverstein, 2019). On the longer timescale of cultural evolution, agent‐based model simulations of this kind of group cognition can generate novel shared behaviors (Smaldino, 2019) and novel shared concepts (Falandays & Smaldino, 2021) of the type we observe in real societies.…”

Cultural Evolution and Music

“…Based on some of the experimental studies described earlier in the chapter it is quite likely that transformative processes play an important role in human music as well, but it is notoriously di cult to separate the in uence of biased transmission from transformation. Luckily, there are some new modeling (Acerbi et al, 2021;Mesoudi, 2021;Falandays and Smaldino, 2021) and empirical (Strachan et al, 2021) methods that may facilitate future study of transformative processes in music.…”

Organizational Development as Generative Entrenchment

“…Individuals transmit information and behavioral practices through a variety of learning mechanisms, such that transmission flows from many sources (not just parents) over an individual's entire lifespan (not just at conception) [59]. Further, the fidelity of transmission is shaped and constrained by perceptual and communication systems that are themselves shaped by cultural evolution [71][72][73]. This process gets even more complicated when the developmental systems in question are not individuals but organizations.…”