The cultural evolution of cultural learning

All Souls College and Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford

Cultural learning is the subset of social cognitive processes that enable cumulative cultural evolution; they allow humans to pass information from one generation to the next, and thereby to invent artefacts, develop institutions, and accumulate bodies of knowledge that go well beyond the cognitive capacities of individuals or temporally isolated groups.  In common with ‘High Church evolutionary psychologists’, cultural evolutionists typically assume that the mechanisms underlying cultural learning are innate modules; that they evolved by genetic means as adaptations for cultural inheritance.  In contrast, I will suggest in this talk that some of the most important mechanisms of cultural learning – those involved in imitation, mindreading, and teaching  – are themselves products of cultural evolution.  Examining evidence from comparative and developmental psychology, and from cognitive neuroscience, I will argue that we learn from others how to learn from others.