Social learning and memory

Author:

Ammar Madeleine1ORCID,Fogarty Laurel1ORCID,Kandler Anne1ORCID

Affiliation:

1. Theory in Cultural Evolution Lab, Department of Human Behavior, Ecology, and Culture, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 04103 Leipzig, Germany

Abstract

The adaptability of human populations to changing environments is often attributed to the human capacity for social learning, innovation, and culture. In rapidly changing environments, it has been shown that maintaining high levels of cultural variation is beneficial because it allows for efficient adaptation. However, in many theoretical models, a high level of cultural variation also implies that a large amount of useless and perhaps detrimental information must be maintained and used, leading to lower population fitness in general. Here, we begin to investigate this often conflicting relationship between adaptation and cultural variation. We explicitly allow for the interplay between social learning and environmental variability, alongside the capacity for “memory,” i.e., the storage, retrieval, and forgetting of information. Here, memory allows individuals to retain unexpressed cultural variation, which does not directly impact adaptation. We show that this capacity for memory facilitates the evolution of social learning across a broader range of circumstances than previously thought. Results from this analysis may help to establish whether and when memory should be incorporated into cultural evolutionary models focused on questions of adaptation.

Publisher

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Subject

Multidisciplinary

Reference34 articles.

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2. R. Boyd, P. J. Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process (University of Chicago Press, 1985).

3. Evolution of social learning does not explain the origin of human cumulative culture

4. Tradeoffs between the strength of conformity and number of conformists in variable environments

5. The fundamentals of cultural adaptation: implications for human adaptation

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