Dear All, Sorry for reposting but the system, again, brought in an older email to the
Simon Kirby talk announcement. Here is the corrected version:
The CEU Department of Cognitive Science cordially invites you to its talk (as part of its
Departmental Colloquium series)
by
Simon Kirby
University of Edinburgh
www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~simon
Date: Wednesday, May 20th, 2015 - 17:00-18:30
The Cultural Origins of Structure
Language is striking in its systematic structure at all levels of description. By
exhibiting combinatoriality and compositionality, each utterance in a language does not
stand alone, but rather exhibits a network of dependencies on the other utterances in that
language. Where does this structure come from? Why is language systematic, and where else
might we expect to find this kind of systematicity in nature?
In this talk, I will propose a simple hypothesis that systematic structure is the
inevitable result of a suite of behaviours being transmitted by iterated learning.
Iterated learning is a mechanism of cultural evolution in which behaviours persist by
being learned through observation of that behaviour in another individual who acquired it
in the same way. I will survey a wide range of lab studies of iterated learning, in which
the cultural evolution ofsets of behaviours is experimentally recreated. These studies
include everything from artificial language learning tasks and sign language experiments,
to more abstract behaviours like slide whistle imitation and sequence learning, and have
recently even been extended to other species. I will conclude by suggesting that these
cultural evolution experiments provide clear predictions about where we should expect to
see structure in behaviour, and what form that structure might take.
See more at:
http://cognitivescience.ceu.edu/events/2015-05-20/departmental-colloquium-d…
We're looking forward to see you there! (Oktober 6 street 7, room 101)
Cognitive Science Events at CEU:
http://cognitivescience.ceu.hu/events
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