The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines

In recent years, the phenomenon of cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) has become the focus of major research interest in biology, psychology and anthropology. Some researchers argue that CCE is unique to humans and underlies our extraordinary evolutionary success as a species. Others claim to have found CCE in non-human species. Yet others remain sceptical that CCE is even important for explaining human behavioural diversity and complexity. These debates are hampered by multiple and often ambiguous definitions of CCE. Here, Professor Mesoudi reviews how researchers define, use and test CCE. He identifies a core set of criteria for CCE which are both necessary and sufficient, and may be found in non-human species. He also identifies a set of extended criteria that are observed in human CCE but not, to date, in other species. Different socio-cognitive mechanisms may underlie these different criteria. He reinterprets previous theoretical models and observational and experimental studies of both human and non-human species in light of these more fine-grained criteria. Finally, Professor Mesoudi discusses key issues surrounding information, fitness and cognition. He recommends that researchers are more explicit about what components of CCE they are testing and claiming to demonstrate.

Professor Alex Mesoudi, University of Exeter, UK

Professor Alex Mesoudi, University of Exeter, UK

Professor Mesoudi is Professor of Cultural Evolution in the Human Behaviour and Cultural Evolution Group at the University of Exeter’s Cornwall Campus. Previously he was Reader in Anthropology at Durham University, and a Lecturer in Psychology at Queen Mary University of London. He studies human cultural evolution, both how human culture evolved and how culture itself evolves over time. He uses experiments to simulate cultural evolution in the lab. He gets people to make and copy technological artifacts like arrowheads or handaxes, or solve problems resembling real-world challenges, aiming to understand how psychological and social processes have shaped cultural change past and present. He also constructs models of cultural evolution. Professor Mesoudi has modelled cumulative technological change, copycat suicides, and the effects of migration on cultural diversity. Finally, he analyses big datasets to explain real world patterns of cultural evolution. Recent analyses have explored the cultural evolution of pop music and football tactics.

In this talk, Professor Bredeche will present how social learning can be implemented in a swarm of robots when sensing, action, and communication are performed on a local basis. From a roboticist point of view, social learning can be seen as a method to perform online distributed reinforcement learning and can be extremely useful when the environment in which the robots are deployed is not known in advance. In particular, he will show how social learning helps to diffuse individual innovations throughout the swarm, whether for exploiting unexpected environmental cues or complex collision-based physical interactions between robots. Experiments with real robot swarms will be shown to illustrate how tasks such as foraging, phototaxis, and self-aggregation can be learned, as well as how the morphology of the robots can be exploited to perform some sort of morphological computation. Beyond robotics engineering, Ihe will also show how social learning in a robot swarm can lead to the emergence of collective behaviours even in the absence of any user-defined task, through the emergence of behavioural patterns that ensure survival and social strategies. Finally, Professor Bredeche will discuss how the tools from swarm robotics can be used to simulate how mutual cooperation and cooperation with partner choice can be learned.

Professor Nicolas Bredeche, Sorbonne Université, France

Professor Nicolas Bredeche, Sorbonne Université, France

Nicolas Bredeche is Professeur des Universités (full professor) in computer science at Sorbonne Université in Paris, France. He is a member of the Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique (Campus Pierre et Marie Curie). His research activity revolves around adaptive collective systems with two motivations: (1) to understand natural systems, using individual-based modelling and simulation methods  (eg collective decision making, evolution of cooperation) and (2) to design adaptive collective/swarm robotic systems using evolutionary and social learning algorithms (eg behaviour optimisation for collective robotics, online distributed evolutionary learning for swarm robotics). He is particularly interested in how a collective of individuals, whether artificial or natural, can learn how to self-organise and survive together in open environments.

In this paper, Professor Tomasello and Professor O'Madagain argue that the distinctive features of human culture derive from humans' unique skills and motivations for coordinating with one another around different types of action and information. As different levels of these skills of ‘shared intentionality’ emerged over the last several hundred thousand years, human culture became characterised first by such things as collaborative activities and pedagogy based on cooperative communication, and then by such things as collaborative innovations and normatively structured pedagogy. As a kind of capstone of this trajectory, humans began to coordinate not just on joint actions and shared beliefs, but on the reasons for what we believe or how we act. Coordinating on reasons powered the kinds of extremely rapid innovation and stable cumulative cultural evolution especially characteristic of the human species in the last several tens of thousands of years.

Professor Michael Tomasello, Duke University, USA

Professor Michael Tomasello, Duke University, USA

Michael Tomasello is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University, and Emeritus Director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany. His research interests focus on processes of cooperation, communication, and cultural learning in human children and great apes. His recent books include Origins of Human Communication (MIT Press, 2008); Why We Cooperate (MIT Press, 2009); A Natural History of Human Thinking (Harvard University Press, 2014); A Natural History of Human Morality (Harvard University Press, 2016); and Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny (Harvard University Press, 2019).

Professor Cathal O'Madagain, Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique, Morocco

Professor Cathal O'Madagain, Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique, Morocco

Cathal O'Madagain is the Scientific Director of the School of Collective Intelligence at UM6P in Morocco, where he is also Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Psychology. This school is a new research institute focused on how groups think, make decisions and collaborate. His primary focus is on the ways in which human thought and knowledge depend on various kinds of social interaction. Current projects include work on the development of rationality in humans and great apes, and the role of reasons in the transmission of new technologies and ideas, which he is exploring with communities of farmers in rural Morocco.

In this talk Professor Winfield reviews a series of experiments in collective social robotics, spanning more than 10 years, with the long-term aim of building embodied models of (aspects) of cultural evolution. These experiments address the question 'how do we have culture?', by modelling the low-level processes and mechanisms of cultural evolution, with robots.

The initial experiments demonstrated the emergence of behavioural traditions in a group of social robots programmed to imitate each other’s behaviours (which we call copybots). These experiments show that the noisy (ie less than perfect fidelity) imitation that comes for free with real physical robots gives rise naturally to variation in social learning; they also show how the robots’ morphology and sensorium ‘normalises’ these behaviours. 

Professor Winfield then outlines more recent experimental work which extends the robot’s cognitive capabilities with simulation-based internal models, equipping them with a simple artificial theory of mind. With this extended capability it is proposed to explore social learning not via imitation but robot-robot storytelling (storybots), in an effort to model this very human mode of cultural transmission.

Professor Winfield concludes the talk by showing how Dennett’s Tower of Generate and Test provides a unifying framework for this work. It is hoped that this work stimulates not only discussion but suggestions for hypotheses to test with the storybots.

Professor Alan FT Winfield, Bristol Robotics Laboratory, UWE Bristol, UK

Professor Alan FT Winfield, Bristol Robotics Laboratory, UWE Bristol, UK

Alan Winfield is Professor of Robot Ethics at the University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol, UK, Visiting Professor at the University of York, and Associate Fellow of the Cambridge Centre for the Future of Intelligence. He received his PhD in Digital Communications from the University of Hull in 1984, then co-founded and led APD Communications Ltd until taking-up appointment at UWE, Bristol in 1992. Alan co-founded the Bristol Robotics Laboratory where his research is focused on the science, engineering and ethics of cognitive robotics.

Alan is passionate about communicating research and ideas in science, engineering and technology; he led UK-wide public engagement project Walking with Robots, and was awarded the 2010 Royal Academy of Engineering Rooke medal for public promotion of engineering. Until recently he was director of UWE’s Science Communication Unit. Alan has published over 270 works, including Robotics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2012); he lectures widely on robotics, presenting to both academic and public audiences, and blogs at http://alanwinfield.blogspot.com/.

Human societies are collective brains. People within every society have cultural brains – brains that have evolved to selectively seek out adaptive knowledge and socially transmit solutions. Innovations emerge at a population level through the transmission of serendipitous mistakes, incremental improvements and novel recombinations. The rate of innovation through these mechanisms is a function of (1) a society’s size and interconnectedness (sociality), which affects the number of models available for learning; (2) fidelity of information transmission, which affects how much information is lost during social learning; and (3) cultural trait diversity, which affects the range of possible solutions available for recombination. In general, and perhaps surprisingly, all three levers can increase and harm innovation by creating challenges around coordination, conformity and communication. Here, Robin Schimmelpfennig and Dr Muthukrishna will focus on the ‘paradox of diversity’– that cultural trait diversity offers the largest potential for empowering innovation, but also poses difficult challenges at both an organizational and societal level. They will introduce ‘cultural evolvability’ as a framework for tackling these challenges, with implications for entrepreneurship, polarization and a nuanced understanding of the effects of diversity. This framework can guide researchers and practitioners in how to reap the benefits of diversity by reducing costs.

Robin Schimmelpfennig, University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Robin Schimmelpfennig, University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Robin Schimmelpfennig is a PhD student with Charles Efferson at the Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Lausanne. He is affiliated with the Muthukrishna Lab at the London School of Economics. His research focuses on two broad questions (1) when and how can social learning lead to behavioural spillovers and path-dependencies in populations? (2) How can policy-makers and organizations use cultural evolutionary behavioural science for positive impact? He has previously received a scholarship from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation and is currently a Swiss National Science Foundation graduate researcher. In his professional career, he has lived and worked in Mexico, South Africa, Jordan, Uganda, the UK and Switzerland.

Dr Michael Muthukrishna, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

Dr Michael Muthukrishna, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

Michael Muthukrishna is Associate Professor of Economic Psychology and STICERD Developmental Economics Group Affiliate at the London School of Economics, CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and Technical Director of The Database of Religious History. His research focuses on (1) human evolution, in particular the culture-gene co-evolution of the human brain and (2) cultural evolution, focusing on cooperation, corruption, innovation, and the navigation of cross-cultural differences. He develops formal theories using mathematical and computational modelling and tests their predictions using experimental and data science approaches from psychology and economics. He was recently awarded the APS Rising Star award by the Association of Psychological Science (APS) and the SAGE Early Career Trajectory Award by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP).

Human cognition is not solitary, it is shaped by collective learning and memory. Unlike swarms or herds, human social networks have diverse topologies, serving diverse modes of collective cognition and behaviour. Here, Dr Momennejad reviews research that combines network structure with psychological and neural experiments and modelling to understand how the topology of social networks shapes collective cognition. First, she reviews graph-theoretical approaches to behavioural experiments on collective memory, belief propagation and problem solving. These results show that different topologies of communication networks synchronize or integrate knowledge differently, serving diverse collective goals. Second, she discusses neuroimaging studies showing that human brains encode the topology of one's larger social network and show similar neural patterns to neural patterns of our friends and community ties (eg when watching movies). Third, she discusses cognitive similarities between learning social and non-social topologies, eg in spatial and associative learning, as well as common brain regions involved in processing social and non-social topologies. Finally, Dr Momennejad discusses recent machine learning approaches to collective communication and cooperation in multi-agent artificial networks. Combining network science with cognitive, neural and computational approaches empowers investigating how social structures shape collective cognition, which can in turn help design goal-directed social network topologies.

Dr Ida Momennejad, Microsoft Research NYC, USA

Dr Ida Momennejad, Microsoft Research NYC, USA

Dr Ida Momennejad is a Principal Researcher in Reinforcement Learning at Microsoft Research NYC. She studies how we build models of the world and use them in memory, exploration and planning. To do this, she builds and tests neurally plausible algorithms for learning the structure of the environment. Her approach spans single and multi-agent settings, combining reinforcement learning, network science and machine learning with behavioural experiments, fMRI and electrophysiology.

Various studies have investigated cognitive mechanisms underlying culture in humans and other great apes. However, the adaptive reasons for the evolution of uniquely sophisticated cumulative culture in our species remain unclear. Professor Migliano proposes that the cultural capabilities of humans are the evolutionary result of a stepwise transition from the ape-like lifestyle of earlier hominins to the foraging niche still observed in extant hunter–gatherers. Recent ethnographic, archaeological and genetic studies have provided compelling evidence that the components of the foraging niche (social egalitarianism, sexual and social division of labour, extensive co-residence and cooperation with unrelated individuals, multilocality, fluid sociality and high between-camp mobility) engendered a unique multilevel social structure where the cognitive mechanisms underlying cultural evolution (high-fidelity transmission, innovation, teaching, recombination, ratcheting) evolved as adaptations. Therefore, multilevel sociality underlies a ‘social ratchet’ or irreversible task specialization splitting the burden of cultural knowledge across individuals, which may explain why human collective intelligence is uniquely able to produce sophisticated cumulative culture. The foraging niche perspective may explain why a complex gene-culture dual inheritance system evolved uniquely in humans and interprets the cultural, morphological and genetic origins of Homo sapiens as a process of recombination of innovations appearing in differentiated but interconnected populations.

Professor Andrea B Migliano, University of Zurich, Switzerland

Professor Andrea B Migliano, University of Zurich, Switzerland

Andrea Bamberg Migliano has been Professor in Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Zurich since 2018. She works on comparative behaviour of hunter-gatherer populations, with ongoing fieldwork in the Philippines, Congo and Nepal. She uses behavioural ecology, network analyses and experimental psychology to understand how diversity in the hunter-gatherers foraging niche has shaped human specific adaptations such as complex sociality, cumulative culture, pro-sociality and collective actions. Professor Migliano received her PhD in Evolutionary Anthropology from the University of Cambridge in 2007, followed by a Junior Research Fellowship at Clare College, Cambridge and an Associate Professorship at University College London. Since moving to Zurich, Professor Migliano has started the Hunter-Gatherers Evolutionary Ecology Group and expanded her comparative fieldwork approach to Nepal and the Amazon.

How do cultural learning mechanisms interact with artificial evolution in a population of evolving robots? This talk will provide an overview of how learning (in the form of individual learning and/or cultural learning) can augment evolutionary approaches to the joint optimisation of the body and control of a robot. The overview is grounded in a general framework for evolution which permits the interaction of artificial evolution acting on a  population with individual and cultural learning mechanisms. Professor Hart will discuss examples of variations of the general scheme of  'evolution plus learning' from a broad range of robotic systems, and reflect on how the interaction of the two paradigms influences diversity, performance, and rate of improvement. Specifically, Professor Hart will describe a novel form of cultural learning in which an individual’s ability to learn over its lifetime is influenced by drawing on a structured knowledge-store that captures historical knowledge from past generations, enabling learning to be bootstrapped. The talk will also touch on how such knowledge should be represented in order to be most easily exploited.

Professor Emma Hart, Edinburgh Napier University, UK

Professor Emma Hart, Edinburgh Napier University, UK

Professor Emma Hart has worked in the field of Evolutionary Computing for over 20 years on a range of applications ranging from combinatorial optimisation to robotics, where the latter includes robot design and swarm robotics. Her current work is mainly centred in Evolutionary Robotics, bringing together ideas on using artificial evolution as tool for optimisation with research that focuses on how robots can be made to continually learn, improving performance as they gather information from their own or other robots’ experiences. The work has attracted significant media attention including recently in national newspapers such as the Guardian; she presented this work at TEDWomen in December 2021.

Patterns of social interactions at regional and local scales are increasingly being framed as underpinnings of human cultural evolution. From this perspective, the socio-spatial structure of prehistoric hunter–gatherers is key for understanding the selective pressures underlying cumulative culture. However, very little is known about the interplay between ancestral patterns of social connectivity and culture. In order to address this gap, Dr Romano focuses on the relationship between long-term changes in socio-spatial connectivity and cultural transmission during the Late Glacial and Holocene periods in Europe. In this talk, she will first introduce a network-based framework that considers multi-scalar interactions over time and space. She will then discuss different examples of cultural phenomena in which the analysis of social networks could unravel the role of social connectivity on cultural transmission. In doing so, she will discuss the challenges of reconstructing archaeological networks and the perspectives in the field. Dr Romano will finally argue that social connectivity should not be considered as an independent factor driving cumulative culture, but one that influences cultural transmission in prehistory. She hope this talk highlights the potential contribution of archaeology to the multidisciplinary debate around cumulative culture.

Dr Valéria Romano, Universidad de Alicante, Spain and Mediterranean Institute of Marine and Terrestrial Biodiversity and Ecology (IMBE), France

Dr Valéria Romano, Universidad de Alicante, Spain and Mediterranean Institute of Marine and Terrestrial Biodiversity and Ecology (IMBE), France

Dr Romano is a behavioural ecologist interested in the evolution of social behaviour. Her research focuses on the interplay between social structure and information and pathogen transmission in non-human primates and humans. She has crossed disciplinary boundaries to apply well-developed methodologies in ecology to reconstruct archaeological networks. She combines observational and experimental approaches with theoretical modelling, which delve into network analysis and individual-based models. She has a PhD in Ecology and Animal Behaviour from the University of Strasbourg, France and has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Kyoto University, Japan and University of Alicante, Spain. Dr Romano is currently an IRD postdoctoral fellow at the Mediterranean Institute of Marine and Terrestrial Biodiversity and Ecology, France.