@phdthesis{Chimento2022influ-59669,
  year={2022},
  title={The influence of social processes and structures on cultural evolution},
  author={Chimento, Michael},
  address={Konstanz},
  school={Universität Konstanz}
}

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    <dcterms:title>The influence of social processes and structures on cultural evolution</dcterms:title>
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    <dcterms:issued>2022</dcterms:issued>
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    <dc:creator>Chimento, Michael</dc:creator>
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    <dcterms:abstract xml:lang="eng">Cultural inheritance provides adaptive information at a low cost, and facilitates behavioral plasticity in response to environmental variation. In non-human animals, cultural traits are especially ephemeral, as their behavior cannot be stored in oral tradition, books, sheet music or servers. Transmission occurs only through transient social associations, and the importance of social structure and processes for culture has been widely recognized. Yet, there is a paucity of empirical and theoretical work, especially in non-human species. This thesis aims to help fill these gaps using a combination of computational models and controlled experimental studies using a well-known social learner, the great tit (Parus major). I first explore the effect of population turnover on cultural selection for efficiency in a cultural diffusion experiment. The results suggest that naive learners better sampled the behavioral space, driving cultural selection. To explore this further, I develop a computational model of social learning wherein networks of agents can socially learn behavior, and make behavioral decisions amongst their repertoire. The model provides theoretical predictions regarding how behavioral production rules during maintenance influence cultural diffusions. Using the model as a basis, I then theoretically explore population turnover, resulting in predictions that support the results of the experiment: turnover benefits behaviorally conservative learners, and the effects of turnover vary according to population size and density. In a second diffusion experiment, I explore what happens in spatially variable environments when turnover introduces already knowledgeable birds, rather than naive birds. I find that immigrants were most likely to adopt a resident behavior when they immigrated to a novel physical environment, which triggered payoff-biased social learning. In comparison, birds who immigrated to a similar environment relied on individual learning.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The final 3 chapters focus on the theme of cumulative cultural evolution (CCE). I develop a computational model to test claims that multi-level human social network architectures are particularly well-suited to recombinatorial CCE. Results show that many different types of network architectures perform similarly, including lattice networks found in territorial species. Then, in another diffusion experiment with wild tits, I show how recombinatorial CCE is possible through the asocial reconstruction of behavior. Finally, I review how efficiency has been defined in the animal literature, and develop the idea that efficiency can be viewed from two perspectives: the organism's fitness, as well as the behavior's fitness. I highlight how severe constraints on non-human animals should create selection pressure for both types of efficiency. Taken altogether, this thesis contributes to a better understanding of the influence that social processes and structures have on cultural evolution. It describes how cultural evolution can occur in non-human species, even if it relies on simpler mechanisms such as reinforcement learning rather than biased transmission, or asocial reconstruction rather than faithful transmission. Finally, it underlines individual, social and environmental constraints on animal culture, and offer a partial answer as to why we don't often find a CCE in non-human species.</dcterms:abstract>
    <dc:date rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime">2023-01-11T10:07:17Z</dc:date>
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    <dc:rights>Attribution 4.0 International</dc:rights>
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    <dc:contributor>Chimento, Michael</dc:contributor>
    <dc:language>eng</dc:language>
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