Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The unique cumulative nature of human culture has often beenexplained by high-fidelity copying mechanisms found only inhuman social learning. However, transmission chain exper-iments in human and non-human primates suggest that cu-mulative cultural evolution (CCE) might not be dependent onhigh-fidelity copying after all. In this study we test whetherCCE is possible even with a non-copying task. We performedtransmission chain experiments in Guinea baboons and chil-dren where individuals observed and reproduced visual pat-terns on touch screen devices. In order to be rewarded, par-ticipants had to avoid touching squares that were touched bya previous participant. In other words, they were regardedfor innovation rather than copying. Results nevertheless ex-hibited two fundamental properties of CCE: an increase overgenerations in task performance and the emergence of sys-tematic structure. However, CCE arose from different mecha-nisms across species: children, unlike baboons, converged inbehaviour over generations by copying specific patterns in adifferent location, thus introducing alternative copying mech-anisms into the non-copying task. We conclude that CCE canresult from non-copying tasks and that there is a broad spec-trum of possible mechanisms that will lead to CCE aside fromhigh-fidelity transmission.