NDLI: How copying affects the amount, evenness and persistence of cultural knowledge: insights from the social learning strategies tournament

Content Provider	PubMed Central
Author	Rendell, L. Boyd, R. Enquist, M. Feldman, M. W. Fogarty, L. Laland, K. N.
Copyright Year	2011
Abstract	Darwinian processes should favour those individuals that deploy the most effective strategies for acquiring information about their environment. We organized a computer-based tournament to investigate which learning strategies would perform well in a changing environment. The most successful strategies relied almost exclusively on social learning (here, learning a behaviour performed by another individual) rather than asocial learning, even when environments were changing rapidly; moreover, successful strategies focused learning effort on periods of environmental change. Here, we use data from tournament simulations to examine how these strategies might affect cultural evolution, as reflected in the amount of culture (i.e. number of cultural traits) in the population, the distribution of cultural traits across individuals, and their persistence through time. We found that high levels of social learning are associated with a larger amount of more persistent knowledge, but a smaller amount of less persistent expressed behaviour, as well as more uneven distributions of behaviour, as individuals concentrated on exploiting a smaller subset of behaviour patterns. Increased rates of environmental change generated increases in the amount and evenness of behaviour. These observations suggest that copying confers on cultural populations an adaptive plasticity, allowing them to respond to changing environments rapidly by drawing on a wider knowledge base.
Related Links	http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2010.0376
Ending Page	1128
Page Count	11
Starting Page	1118
File Format	PDF
ISSN	09628436
e-ISSN	14712970
Journal	Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Issue Number	1567
Volume Number	366
Language	English
Publisher	The Royal Society
Publisher Date	2011-04-12
Access Restriction	Open
Rights Holder	The Royal Society
Subject Keyword	Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology(all) Agricultural and Biological Sciences(all) Research in Higher Education
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology Agricultural and Biological Sciences

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1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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