The evolution of cognitive mechanisms in response to cultural innovations

Abstract

When humans and other animals make cultural innovations, they also change their environment, thereby imposing new selective pressures that can modify their biological traits. For example, there is evidence that dairy farming by humans favored alleles for adult lactose tolerance. Similarly, the invention of cooking possibly affected the evolution of jaw and tooth morphology. However, when it comes to cognitive traits and learning mechanisms, it is much more difficult to determine whether and how their evolution was affected by culture or by their use in cultural transmission. Here we argue that, excluding very recent cultural innovations, the assumption that culture shaped the evolution of cognition is both more parsimonious and more productive than assuming the opposite. In considering how culture shapes cognition, we suggest that a process-level model of cognitive evolution is necessary and offer such a model. The model employs relatively simple coevolving mechanisms of learning and data acquisition that jointly construct a complex network of a type previously shown to be capable of supporting a range of cognitive abilities. The evolution of cognition, and thus the effect of culture on cognitive evolution, is captured through small modifications of these coevolving learning and data-acquisition mechanisms, whose coordinated action is critical for building an effective network. We use the model to show how these mechanisms are likely to evolve in response to cultural phenomena, such as language and tool-making, which are associated with major changes in data patterns and with new computational and statistical challenges.tool-making | language evolution | niche construction | cognitive evolution | social learning A n open question in the study of culture and cognitive evolution is whether (and to what extent) cognitive mechanisms, especially those viewed as advanced or sophisticated, evolved in response to social-learning challenges or are merely the product of domain-general mechanisms (1-3). According to one view-still widely held in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology-cognitive adaptations take the form of specialized brain modules (or neuronal mechanisms) that evolved for specific, often social purposes, such as "imitation" (4, 5), "mind reading" (6, 7), "cheating detection" (8), or most famously, language acquisition (9, 10). These ideas have been criticized on theoretical and empirical grounds (11,12), and the debate around them demonstrates our limited understanding of the evolution of cognition, its relationship to the evolution of social behavior and, in some organisms, culture.The question of whether culture and social behavior shape the evolution of the brain is, in our view, best considered using the evolutionary framework of niche construction (13-16): that is, culture and social behavior change the ecological niche to which cognitive traits must adapt in the same manner that nest-building by birds changes the ecological niche in which their nestlings evolve. For example, animals' ability t...

Innovation: an emerging focus from cells to societies

“…Dukas [154] provides an overview of the foundations of cognition and associated innovations leading to ever-greater complexity, particularly in mammals. [155]) and (its correlate) further innovation [61]. More research is necessary, particularly in understanding how evolution underpins innovation epochs in cognition and expertise, and how these employ automated and plastic responses.…”

A social insect perspective on the evolution of social learning mechanisms

“…Nonetheless, very recent work has begun to focus on potentially emulative behavior even in bees (8,9), and it is not our intention to imply that such processes follow a different evolutionary pathway to other forms of social learning. In fact, associative explanations for imitation are prominent in the psychology literature [40,88; see also Lotem et al (33)]. Explaining how individuals copy a novel sequence of actions through imitation invokes a "correspondence problem" (89,90) because the seen movements of others must somehow be matched to motor representations of self-movements.…”

“…But the contention that no major qualitative leaps are required to distinguish at least some social learning processes from asocial learning is not an argument against evolutionary change. It has been argued that a likely pathway for cognitive evolution may be the accumulation of small quantitative changes that render domain-general processes a closer fit to the specific cognitive demands of a particular niche (32,33). Because almost all animals interact with others at some point during their lifetime, these demands most likely include effective processing of social information.…”

“…In the light of claims that students of animal cognition might sometimes be "associationblind" (24), we hope that this approach proves useful not only in highlighting how associative learning theory can be applied to This paper results from the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium of the National Academy of Sciences, "The Extension of Biology Through Culture," held November [16][17]2016 empirical work on animal social learning, but also in stimulating consideration of how natural selection might modify associative mechanisms. Social learning involves upstream input mechanisms that define how social information is received, and downstream parameters that define how associations are weighted, processed, stored, retrieved, and applied, and all may be potential targets for selection (29,32,33). Given the phylogenetic distance between insects and vertebrates (and even between the diverse vertebrate groups within which social learning abilities are manifest), we do not infer that any evolutionary modifications would necessarily be conserved across lineages through common descent; such inference would have little foundation.…”

Synchronized practice helps bearded capuchin monkeys learn to extend attention while learning a tradition

“…Given the essential role of learning in traditions, cognitive processes associated with learning that show developmental plasticity themselves, should be incorporated into our understanding of how culture can extend biology (13)(14)(15). However, cognitive processes associated with learning are not yet well integrated into theories of cultural evolution and niche construction (16).…”