Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Humans can use recursive combination operation in various behaviors; other primates, however, rarely perform thisoperation. In our previous research, using an evolutionary simulation of combination behavior, we showed that recursive com-bination was more adaptive than repetitive combination in cases where the robustness of production or the diversity of productswas required. In this research, we examined the evolvability of recursive combination in combinatorial space parametrizedby kinds of elemental materials and the number of elements per product. Recursive combination evolved in the region of lowkinds of elemental materials and large number of elements per product. This region may be compared with the situation of themiddle stone age when invented diversified tools with limited kinds of materials such as stone, bone, and woods. The recursivecombinatorial operation could scaffold the evolution of general recursive combination abilities including language, technology,music, and mathematics.