Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Cumulative culture is often described as a ratchet that builds ever more complex structures, knowledge, and technology. However, this complexity comes at a cost. Though cultural innovations may offer new opportunities or insights, they also present new ways to become confused or cognitively burdened. Cultural evolution may thus act both like a ratchet (accumulating useful innovations) and like a hatchet (stripping away representational deadwood). Building on a recent theory of value-guided construal, we formalize this utility-complexity trade-off using a model inspired by navigating with a map. We embed this model in an evolutionary dynamic, where the maps of successful navigators are selectively copied. As expected, more complex (simpler) maps are favored when they are more useful and when agents have a higher (lower) representational capacity. Yet surprisingly, the evolutionarily stable map is often more or less complex than the optimal map, driven by the availability of social information. More broadly, our modeling results show how cognitive costs, social learning, and cultural selection can jointly shape our minds and the material artifacts that aid them.