Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Cumulative cultural evolution is a distinctively human formof information-processing that endows our societies with im-probable and efficient technologies. But how objective is thisprocess? A widely held conjecture is that human cognitivebiases can constrain cumulative cultural evolution, and there-fore shape our discoveries. We present a Bayesian analysis ofa simple form of cumulative cultural evolution. This modelallows us to formulate and test the theoretical conjecture inan experimental setting. Across a series of behavioural ex-periments, we show that people’s inductive biases constrain apopulation’s ability to discover counter-intuitive virtual tech-nologies in a simple search problem. Our analysis highlightsformal relationships between cumulative cultural evolution,Bayesian inference, and stochastic optimization.