Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How does the process of information transmission affect thecultural products that emerge from that process? This questionis often studied experimentally and computationally via iter-ated learning, in which participants learn from previous partic-ipants in a chain. Much research in this area builds on math-ematical analyses suggesting that iterated learning chains con-verge to people’s priors. We present three simulation studiessuggesting that when the population of learners is heteroge-neous, the behavior of the chain is systematically distorted bythe learners with the most extreme biases. We discuss implica-tions for the use of iterated learning as a methodological tooland for the processes that might have shaped cultural productsin the real world.