Social learning and memory.

ABSTRACT: The adaptability of human populations to changing environments is often attributed to the human capacity for social learning, innovation, and culture. In rapidly changing environments, it has been shown that maintaining high levels of cultural variation is beneficial because it allows for efficient adaptation. However, in many theoretical models, a high level of cultural variation also implies that a large amount of useless and perhaps detrimental information must be maintained and used, leading to lower population fitness in general. Here, we begin to investigate this often conflicting relationship between adaptation and cultural variation. We explicitly allow for the interplay between social learning and environmental variability, alongside the capacity for "memory," i.e., the storage, r

SUBMITTER: Ammar M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10433305 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature