CBB Seminar | Social Seminar ~ Xavier Roberts-Gaal, Graduate Student, Harvard University

CBB  Seminar  

Xavier Roberts-Gaal ~ Laboratory for Social Cognitive Science (Cushman)

Title - The Cultural Evolution of Cognitive Scaffolds 

Culture equips us with continually-expanding adaptive capabilities that no one person could reinvent from scratch, from material artifacts and technology to institutions, beliefs, and practices. Yet, as individuals we are limited in the experience we can gain and the cognitive resources we can devote to solving problems. How do we nonetheless effectively leverage our cultural inheritance and contribute to it? I suggest that cognitive scaffolds -- representations that usefully frame problems to aid in decision-making -- may be a key product, and driver, of cultural evolution. First, I'll present an iterated learning experiment that shows how cultural transmission shifts the representational format of advice (between causally opaque and causally rich encodings) in response to environmental demands. Second, I'll present a model that explores when culture maintains progressively richer and more complex representations of decision-making problems (a 'cultural ratchet'), and when it instead is expected to simplify or prune existing representations (a 'cultural hatchet'), through the lens of recent theories of task construal. I will argue that, although we can learn much by studying minds, sociality, and culture in isolation, considering their interplay is equally critical for explaining how we got here.

***CBB and Social talks this semester will be meet on Thursdays, 12:00-1:15pm at NORTHWEST Bldg, B101 AUDITORIUM  (due to the ongoing construction in WJH Plaza).***