Invited Talk
in
Workshop: From Cells to Societies: Collective Learning Across Scales

The accumulation of intelligence in societies via cumulative cultural evolution

Christine Caldwell

2022 Invited Talk
in
Workshop: From Cells to Societies: Collective Learning Across Scales

Abstract

In this talk I will discuss how knowledge and skills can accumulate over generations within populations, a phenomenon described as cumulative cultural evolution. Cumulative cultural evolution is proposed to underpin many of the behavioural characteristics of modern humans. I will also discuss how this phenomenon can be studied under laboratory conditions, and how those experiments can provide insights into the mechanisms by which beneficial discoveries can be retained and even built upon, in spite of continual population turnover.

Speaker

Christine Caldwell

Christine is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Stirling in Scotland. She gained her PhD at the University of St Andrews in 2002 and has been working at the University of Stirling since 2004. She is interested in how knowledge and skills accumulate within groups. To address these questions, her research combines methods and techniques from experimental psychology with theoretical frameworks from the field of cultural evolution. She carries out research with a wide range of different study populations, including human adults and children, and nonhuman primates.

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