We report here trends in the usage of “mood” words, that is, words carrying emotional content, in 20th century English language books, using the data set provided by Google that includes word frequencies in roughly 4% of all books published up to the …
We explore the impact of age on cultural change through simulations of cultural evolution. Our simulations show that common observations about the relationship between old and young naturally emerge from repeated cultural learning. In particular, …
Behavioral “traditions”, i.e. behavioral patterns that are acquired with the aid of social learning and that are relatively stable in a group, have been observed in several species. Recently, however, it has been questioned whether non-human social …
Many cultural traits exhibit volatile dynamics, commonly dubbed fashions or fads. Here we show that realistic fashion-like dynamics emerge spontaneously if individuals can copy others' preferences for cultural traits as well as traits themselves. We …
We call “regulatory traits” those cultural traits that are transmitted through cultural interactions and, at the same time, change individual behaviors directly influencing the outcome of future cultural interactions. The cultural dynamics of some of …
Social transmission of behavior can be realized through distinct mechanisms. Research on primate social learning typically distinguishes two forms of information that a learner can extract from a demonstrator: copying actions (defined as …
La conoscenza antropologica moderna e contemporanea si fonda su un dualismo ontologico ed epistemologico, che ha portato a distinguer la natura della specie umana da quelle delle altre specie animali e le scienze umane dalle scienze naturali. Questa …
We present a model of cultural evolution in which an individual's propensity to engage in social learning is affected by social learning itself. We assume that individuals observe cultural traits displayed by others and decide whether to copy them …
One of the advantages of sociality resides in the opportunity of exploiting the behavior of other individuals of the same group as a reliable source of information. In this paper we present an evolutionary simulation in which a population of 10 …