Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study investigated the social transmission of memoriesand skills collected from a collaborative cooking task (ravioli-making) and across transmission chains. The transmissionover three generations of pairs of participants occurred undertwo conditions. In the interactive condition, transmissionsover generations occurred in face-to-face conversations,whereas in the non-interactive condition, generations video-recorded their instructions to the next generations. Weanalyzed the effects of verbal and embodied features ofinformational transfer on task performance. Our results showthat performances improved over generations regardless ofinteractivity. In the discussion we suggest that tools (likecooking utensils) may have operated as cultural affordancesencapsulating and transmitting important cultural knowledgefor the successful completion of the task.