Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do cumulative cultural evolution and individual learningdiffer? In an abstract computational sense, both are optimisa-tion processes that search a space of possible explanations andprevious work has identified deep parallels in the mathematicalmodels used to describe them (Suchow, Bourgin, & Griffiths,2017). However, there are obvious differences as well: forexample, individual learning involves a single agent charac-terised by one set of prior beliefs, representational capabilities,and so forth, while cultural evolution involves multiple agentswho may vary along these factors. We argue that this differ-ence implies that the process of cumulative cultural evolutionshould involve searching a more restricted set of hypothesesand converge on simpler ones. In two iterated category learn-ing experiments, we test this prediction and find that transmis-sion chains composed of single individuals, who learn basedon their previous performance, consider both a wider varietyand more complex categorisation schemas than do chains in-volving multiple people.