Complex technology requires cultural innovations for distributing cognition.

Over the last decade, new research has shown how human collectives can develop technologies that no single individual could discover on their own. However, this research often overlooks how technology can become so complex that individuals cannot operate it on their own. At this level of technological complexity, distributing cognition is a necessary process for reducing cognitive load on individuals.

Information architectures: a framework for understanding socio-technical systems.

A sequence of technological inventions over several centuries has dramatically lowered the cost of producing and distributing information. Because societies ride on a substrate of information, these changes have profoundly impacted how we live, work, and interact. This paper explores the nature of (IAs)-the features that govern how information flows within human populations.

Statistical signals of copying are robust to time- and space-averaging.

Cattle brands (ownership marks left on animals) are subject to forces influencing other graphic codes: the copying of constituent parts, pressure for distinctiveness and pressure for complexity. The historical record of cattle brands in some US states is complete owing to legal registration, providing a unique opportunity to assess how sampling processes leading to time- and space-averaging influence our ability to make inferences from limited datasets in fields like archaeology. In this preregistered study, we used a dataset of ~81,000 Kansas cattle brands (1990-2016) to explore two aspects: (1) the relative influence of copying, pressure for distinctiveness and pressure for complexity on the creation and diffusion of brand components; and (2) the effects of time- and space-averaging on statistical signals.

Zipf's Law of Abbreviation holds for individual characters across a broad range of writing systems.

Zipf's Law of Abbreviation - the idea that more frequent symbols in a code are simpler than less frequent ones - has been shown to hold at the level of words in many languages. We tested whether it holds at the level of individual written characters. Character complexity is similar to word length in that it requires more cognitive and motor effort for producing and processing more complex symbols.

The cultural transmission of tacit knowledge.

A wide variety of cultural practices have a 'tacit' dimension, whose principles are neither obvious to an observer, nor known explicitly by experts. This poses a problem for cultural evolution: if beginners cannot spot the principles to imitate, and experts cannot say what they are doing, how can tacit knowledge pass from generation to generation? We present a domain-general model of 'tacit teaching', drawn from statistical physics, that shows how high-accuracy transmission of tacit knowledge is possible. It applies when the practice's underlying features are subject to interacting and competing constraints.

WikiArtVectors: Style and Color Representations of Artworks for Cultural Analysis via Information Theoretic Measures.

With the increase in massive digitized datasets of cultural artefacts, social and cultural scientists have an unprecedented opportunity for the discovery and expansion of cultural theory. The WikiArt dataset is one such example, with over 250,000 high quality images of historically significant artworks by over 3000 artists, ranging from the 15th century to the present day; it is a rich source for the potential mining of patterns and differences among artists, genres, and styles. However, such datasets are often difficult to analyse and use for answering complex questions of cultural evolution and divergence because of their raw formats as image files, which are represented as multi-dimensional tensors/matrices.

Culture without copying or selection.

Unlabelled: Typical examples of cultural phenomena all exhibit a degree of similarity across time and space at the level of the population. As such, a fundamental question for any science of culture is, what ensures this stability in the first place? Here we focus on the evolutionary and stabilising role of 'convergent transformation', in which one item causes the production of another item whose form tends to deviate from the original in a directed, non-random way. We present a series of stochastic models of cultural evolution investigating its effects.

Ecological and psychological factors in the cultural evolution of music.

The two target articles agree that processes of cultural evolution generate richness and diversity in music, but neither address this question in a focused way. We sketch one way to proceed - and hence suggest how the target articles differ not only in empirical claims, but also in their tacit, prior assumptions about the relationship between cognition and culture.

Graphic complexity in writing systems.

A writing system is a graphic code, i.e., a system of standardized pairings between symbols and meanings in which symbols take the form of images that can endure.

Motor constraints influence cultural evolution of rhythm.

While widely acknowledged in the cultural evolution literature, ecological factors-aspects of the physical environment that affect the way in which cultural productions evolve-have not been investigated experimentally. Here, we present an experimental investigation of this type of factor by using a transmission chain (iterated learning) experiment. We predicted that differences in the distance between identical tools (drums) and in the order in which they are to be used would cause the evolution of different rhythms.

A Forward Bias in Human Profile-Oriented Portraits.

The spatial composition of human portraits obeys historically changing cultural norms. We show that it is also affected by cognitive factors that cause greater spontaneous attention to what is in front rather in the back of an agent. Scenes with more space in front of a directed object are both more often produced and judged as more aesthetically pleasant.

When iconicity stands in the way of abbreviation: No Zipfian effect for figurative signals.

Zipf's law of abbreviation, relating more frequent signals to shorter signal lengths, applies to sounds in a variety of communication systems, both human and non-human. It also applies to writing systems: more frequent words tend to be encoded by less complex graphemes, even when grapheme complexity is decoupled from word length. This study documents an exception to this law of abbreviation.

Cumulative culture in the laboratory: methodological and theoretical challenges.

In the last decade, cultural transmission experiments (transmission chains, replacement, closed groups and seeded groups) have become important experimental tools in investigating cultural evolution. However, these methods face important challenges, especially regarding the operationalization of theoretical claims. In this review, we focus on the study of cumulative cultural evolution, the process by which traditions are gradually modified and, for technological traditions in particular, improved upon over time.

Developmental and cultural factors in economic beliefs.

Boyer & Petersen (B&P) assume that the intuitive systems underlying folk-economic beliefs (FEBs), and, in particular, emporiophobia, evolved in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA), before markets. This makes the historical development of markets puzzling. We suggest that what evolved in the EEA are templates that help children develop intuitive systems partly adjusted to their cultural environment.

Cognitive Obstacles to Pro-Vaccination Beliefs.

Two frameworks--cultural attraction theory and epistemic vigilance--predict a cultural disadvantage for counter-intuitive beliefs. We review several cognitive mechanisms that conspire to render pro-vaccination beliefs counter-intuitive. Trust and argumentation can spread counter-intuitive beliefs, but only under some conditions.