Culture cumulative, apprentissage social et réseaux sociaux

Claude Meidinger ()
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Claude Meidinger: CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

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Abstract: Discussions about the existence of a culture in non-human species is often concerned by the question whether these species could possess a cognitive complexity sufficient to allow them to imitate others. According to many authors, to imitate is a cognitively sohisticated process that depends on a functionally abstract representation of a problem and its solution, something that non human species do not seem to possess. However, the fast evolution of cognitive performances and of complex inventions in human beings could not be explained only by the improvement of the rate of innovation in individual learning and (or) the improvement of the process of imitation. Such a cumulative evolution depends also on a wider social organization characterized by an increase in the size of the social networks. The simulations displayed here show how such an increase, jointly considered with the diversity of learning processes, allow to better understand the major transitions noted in the cultural evolution of primates and human beings.

Keywords: learning processes; cumulative cultural evolution; social networks; simulations; processus d'apprentissage; évolution culturelle cumulative; réseaux sociaux (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo and nep-hpe
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Published in 2018

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