Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Cumulative cultural evolution in humans is the process through which behaviours gain structure and complexityas they are transmitted from one generation of learners to the next. A central challenge in the cultural evolution literatureis to understand how the unique computational principles of human cognition scaffold the emergence of complex behaviouralsystems. I explore how the human ability to make inferences at higher order levels of abstraction can lead to cultural complexity,in two ways: by allowing initially independent behaviours to gradually acquire group-like structure as new learners repeatedlyimpose an expectation for statistical dependence; and by allowing inferences in one domain to be rapidly transferred to newdomains which share features at higher-order levels of abstraction. I model these processes in populations using a probabilisticcognitive model for the acquisition of vowel systems in human language.