Social tinkering: The social foundations of cultural complexity - Volume 49

Communication; Animal behavior; Zoology

My interview with Dr. Claudio Tennie on how humans and great apes culturally diverged

YouTube video by Psychology @ Brunel

CES will give out two awards of up to $3000 each to support research projects in cultural evolution. To learn more about the Advancing Cultural Evolution (ACE) initiative, see here. Deadline: Appli...

Generative AI is changing how cultural artifacts are created and circulated, and with it our understanding of creativity itself. Researchers disagree about whether these tools enrich or impoverish cul...

We prove RE-completeness (and thus undecidability) of several 2D games in the Super Mario Bros. platform video game series: the New Super Mario Bros. series (original, Wii, U, and 2), and both Super M...

AI can uncover problem-solving strategies beyond human discovery. Here, the authors show that AI-discovered strategies propagate and persist in human populations, producing cultural shifts when non-tr...

Weber's law is a rare quantitative regularity in psychology, yet its origins remain debated. Here we provide causal evidence that it arises from the more fundamental principle of efficient coding. Thi...

Research focused on the United States shows that people’s trust in science varies considerably between disciplines. Existing explanations of these trust gaps st...

Introducing a beta-version of our new research-focused social media platform

We discuss a historical report of chimpanzees Pan troglodytes using stone tools to forage for large oysters Crassostrea tulipa at the Sierra Leone River estuary in 1678, a behaviour that was also note...

Analogies evolve by increasing transmission fidelity in the communication of complex information - Volume 8

Most widely studied option evaluation strategies rely on knowledge accumulated across repeated experiences. But how should options be evaluated in ...

Northeast Africa and Southwest Asia present a rich record of hominin occupations between ca. 100 and 50 thousand years ago (ka) at a critical biogeogr…

We develop a demographic theory of similarity-biased social learning that formalizes our understanding of when and why individuals should preferent...