Mental time travel, memory and the social learning strategies tournament

doi:10.1016/j.lmot.2012.05.009

Learning and Motivation

Volume 43, Issue 4, November 2012, Pages 241-246

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lmot.2012.05.009 Get rights and content

Abstract

The social learning strategies tournament was an open computer-based tournament investigating the best way to learn in a changing environment. Here we present an analysis of the impact of memory on the ability of strategies entered into the social learning strategies tournament (Rendell, Boyd, et al., 2010) to modify their own behavior to suit a changing environment. The tournament showed that a strategy's ability to remember the past and to predict the future were both key to its success. The possibility that a strategy needs to engage in an approximation of ‘mental time travel’ to succeed in the tournament strongly implies that investment in randomly timed social learning is not enough to guarantee success. A strategy must use social learning strategically with reference to both predicted future environmental states and past environmental states. We examine the two most successful strategies (DiscountMachine and Intergeneration) in terms of their use of memory and discuss the impact of their complex memory use on their ability to time learning moves strategically and track environmental change. The tournament suggests that the human capacity for mental time travel may have improved the efficiency of social learning and allowed humans to invest in more sophisticated social learning than is seen elsewhere in the animal kingdom.

Highlights

► We revisit the results of the Social Learning Strategies Tournament. ► We examine the strategies’ ability to use memory and discount information. ► We split the strategies into categories of memory use and future planning. ► Here the ability to use memory, discount information, and future-plan were linked. ► Success in the tournament depended on all of these traits.

Section snippets

The Tournament

Competitors entering the tournament were asked to specify the circumstances under which individual agents should learn asocially (INNOVATE), learn socially (OBSERVE), or perform an act from their repertoire (EXPLOIT). These rules were subsequently translated into computer code.

INNOVATE returned accurate information about the payoff of a randomly selected behavior not in the agent's repertoire. (While in reality which novel behavior individuals adopt may be chosen non-randomly, our assumption

Memory in the Tournament: Definitions and Difficulties

Using submitted prose descriptions as well as the computer code submitted with or generated for each strategy, we can divide the strategies entered to the tournament into a number of memory-use categories (Table 1). These categories by necessity neglect aspects of mental time travel (like theory of mind) that apply only to humans (and perhaps a few non-human animals) and instead concentrate on the use of memory by our computer agents. Thus we can account for their ‘understanding’ of

Results

We analyzed the memory categories in terms of median score using a Kruskal–Wallis test. The memory categories (0, 1, 2, 3, 4) were significantly different from each other (p < 0.001) at the 95% confidence level. Category 4, incorporating both use of memory, discounting and prediction of future environmental changes, had the highest median score (Fig. 1) and was significantly higher than categories 0, 1, 2 and 3. Both the eventual winner of the tournament, DiscountMachine, and the second place

Discussion

It is of course difficult to discuss aspects of the strategies submitted to the tournament in isolation since, as the original analysis of the tournament results showed, there were a number of factors that contributed to the success or otherwise of each strategy. The most important factors that emerged from that analysis were the proportion of learning moves that were social, and the timing of those learning moves (Rendell, Boyd, et al., 2010). It is easy however to see that there might be a

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank R. Boyd, M. Enquist, K. Eriksson, M.W. Feldman, S. Ghirlanda and all tournament entrants, including the winners D. Cownden and T. Lillicrap, ERC FP6 ‘Cultaptation’ and ERC Advanced Grant to KNL and a BBSRC studenship to LF.

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For most of human evolution, accumulated cultural knowledge has been stored in memory and transmitted orally. This presents a daunting information management problem: how to store and transmit this knowledge in a portable format that resists corruption. One solution–widespread among foragers–is to encode knowledge in narrative. However, this strategy depends on accurate performance of the story. Significantly, some forager cultures have rules regulating myth performance, although the extent of this phenomenon is unknown. We hypothesize that these rules subserve high-fidelity transmission across generations. Accordingly, we predicted that, across forager cultures, myth-telling rules will mandate: (P1) transmission by the most proficient storytellers (P2) under low-distraction conditions with (P3) multiple individuals and (P4) multiple generations present, and the application of measures that (P5) prevent, identify, and/or correct errors, (P6) maintain audience attention, (P7) discourage rule violations and/or (P8) incentivize rule compliance. To test these predictions, we searched the forager ethnographic record for descriptions of myth performance, and coded them for prescriptions/proscriptions regarding narrator age, performance context, audience composition, narrative delivery, and audience comportment, as well as sanctions associated with rule transgression or compliance. Results indicate that rules regulating myth performance are widespread across forager cultures, and are characterized by features that reduce the likelihood of copy errors. These findings help elucidate the role that anthropogenic ratchets played in the emergence of cumulative culture.
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View full text

Mental time travel, memory and the social learning strategies tournament

Abstract

Highlights

Section snippets

The Tournament

Memory in the Tournament: Definitions and Difficulties

Results

Discussion

Acknowledgements

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Advanced Studies of Behavior

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Learning and Motivation

Culture and the evolutionary process

Episodic-like memory during cache recovery by scrub-jays

Nature

The Janus face of mnemosyne

Nature

Critical social learning: A solution to Rogers’ paradox of non-adaptive culture

American Anthropologist

Individual versus social learning: Evolutionary analysis in a fluctuating environment

Anthropological Science

Social learning in animals, empirical studies and theoretical models

Biosciences

The evolution of cultural evolution

Evolutionary Anthropology