Cumulative culture spontaneously emerges in artificial navigators who are social and memory-guided
This challenges traditional views on cumulative culture by demonstrating it can emerge in simple systems, potentially broadening definitions or highlighting emergent properties in social-memory interactions.
The study tackled the problem of how cumulative cultural evolution can arise without advanced cognitive skills, showing that artificial agents with minimal social and memory capabilities spontaneously developed increasingly efficient navigation routes across generations, with route efficiency improving within each generation.
Cumulative cultural evolution occurs when adaptive innovations are passed down to consecutive generations through social learning. This process has shaped human technological innovation, but also occurs in non-human species. While it is traditionally argued that cumulative culture relies on high-fidelity social transmission and advanced cognitive skills, here I show that a much simpler system suffices. Cumulative culture spontaneously emerged in artificial agents who navigate with a minimal cognitive architecture of goal-direction, social proximity, and route memory. Within each generation, naive individuals benefitted from being paired with experienced navigators because they could follow previously established routes. Crucially, experienced navigators also benefitted from the presence of naive individuals through regression to the goal. As experienced agents followed their memorised path, their naive counterparts (unhindered by route memory) were more likely to err towards than away from the goal, and thus biased the pair in that direction. This improved route efficiency within each generation. In control experiments, cumulative culture was attenuated when agents' social proximity or route memory were lesioned, whereas eliminating goal-direction only reduced efficiency. These results demonstrate that cumulative cultural evolution occurs even in the absence of sophisticated communication or thought. One interpretation of this finding is that current definitions are too loose, and should be narrowed. An alternative conclusion is that rudimentary cumulative culture is an emergent property of systems that seek social proximity and have an imprecise memory capacity, providing a flexible complement to traditional evolutionary mechanisms.