Memory, innovation and vertical learning.

ABSTRACT: One of the most controversial and actively debated questions about both human and non-human animal culture concerns its relationship with adaptation - under what circumstances might we expect culture, and the ability to learn socially from others, to be beneficial, and favored by natural selection? Existing theory posits that the benefit of social learning depends on the rate at which the environment changes, and recent work has shown that this relationship is mediated by how much information an individual can retain over time - by memory. Based on extensive ethnographic research, vertical learning-social learning from parent to offspring-appears to be an extremely salient and important type of social learning. Here we develop large-scale agent-based simulation models to investigate the ev

SUBMITTER: Ammar M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12697990 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature