Atkinson, M. & Caldwell, C.
University of Stirling
Many human cultural traits become increasingly beneficial as they are repeatedly transmitted, thanks to an accumulation of modifications made by successive generations. But how do later generations typically avoid modifications which revert traits to less beneficial forms already sampled and rejected by earlier generations? And how can later generations do so without direct exposure to their predecessors' behaviour?
One possibility is that learners are sensitive to cues of intentional production in others? behaviour, and that particular variants (e.g. those containing structural regularities unlikely to occur spontaneously) have been produced deliberately and with some effort. If this non-random behaviour is attributed to an informed strategy, then the learner may infer that apparent avoidance of certain possibilities indicates that these have already been sampled and rejected. This could potentially prevent performance plateaus resulting from learners modifying inherited behaviours randomly.
We test this hypothesis in a series of experiments in which participants, either individually or in interacting dyads, attempt to locate rewards in a search grid, guided by partial information of another participant's performance. We assess the roles of task structure, information transparency, and coordination on task success, the avoidance of previously-sampled unrewarded selections, and structural regularities in search behaviour.