Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Cumulative culture ultimately depends on the fidelity of learning between successive generations. When humans learnfrom others in addition to observing inputs and outputs we often observe the process which led to that output. Forinstance, when preparing a meal we don’t just observe a pile of vegetables and then a ratatouille. Instead, we observe acausal process by which those ingredients are transformed. Here we use programs to represent a cultural process and showthat the observation of an execution trace speeds up program induction even when learning from only a single example.This mechanism could account for (1) the high fidelity of social learning which leads to cumulative culture in humans(2) unify the role of emulation and imitation in social learning and (3) account for aspects of moral learning such asritualization.