Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Cumulative culture requires efficient learning mechanisms that can withstand environmental change across generations. We unify two competing theories of the learning mechanism supporting cumulative culture in a common computational framework, distinguishing model-based from model-free social learning. We describe and analyze evolutionary models that explain when and why model-based and model-free social learning are each optimal, and in particular how environmental volatility determines which strategy succeeds. Strikingly, we find that model-based social learning can succeed even in high-volatility environments. These results yield novel predictions concerning cultural variation in social learning mechanisms