Context congruence: How associative learning modulates cultural evolution

PLOS ONE RESEARCH ARTICLE Context congruence: How associative learning modulates cultural evolution Monica Tamariz1,2, Aliki Papa ID1,3*, Mioara Cristea ID1, Nicola McGuigan4 1 Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom, 2 Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom, 3 University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway, 4 University of the West of Scotland, Paisley, Scotland, United Kingdom * a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Tamariz M, Papa A, Cristea M, McGuigan N (2023) Context congruence: How associative learning modulates cultural evolution. PLoS ONE 18(4): e0282776. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0282776 Editor: Olivier Morin, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany, HUNGARY Received: May 2, 2022 Accepted: February 23, 2023 Published: April 4, 2023 Peer Review History: PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process; therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. The editorial history of this article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0282776 Copyright: © 2023 Tamariz et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: Data are available from the Zenodo repository: https://zenodo.org/ record/6463741#.YmlUuVDMJS7. Abstract The adoption of cultural variants by learners is affected by multiple factors including the prestige of the model and the value and frequency of different variants. However, little is known about what affects onward cultural transmission, or the choice of variants that models produce to pass on to new learners. This study investigated the effects on this choice of congruence between two contexts: the one in which variants are learned and the one in which they are later transmitted on. We hypothesized that when we are placed in a particular context, we will be more likely to produce (and therefore transmit) variants that we learned in that same (congruent) context. In particular, we tested the effect of a social contextual aspect–the relationship between model and learner. Our participants learned two methods to solve a puzzle, a variant from an “expert” (in an expert-to-novice context) and another one from a “peer” (in a peer-to-peer context). They were then asked to transmit one method onward, either to a “novice” (in a new expert-to-novice context) or to another “peer” (in a new peer-to-peer context). Participants were, overall, more likely to transmit the variant learned from an expert, evidencing an effect of by prestige bias. Crucially, in support of our hypothesis, they were also more likely to transmit the variant they had learned in the congruent context. Parameter estimation computer simulations of the experiment revealed that congruence bias was stronger than prestige bias. 1 Introduction Human culture is the unique product of cumulatively adaptive evolution [1, 2], which has led to diversity and sophistication levels unparalleled in the animal kingdom [3]. The social transmission of cultural traits has been extensively studied (see reviews by [4–7], e.g., in the laboratory [8–11], with mathematical models [12–15], agent-based computer simulations [16, 17], and even in real-world paradigms [18, 19]. We now have a good understanding of the many biases that influence which of the cultural variants that learners observe will be adopted [20– 23]. In contrast, the factors affecting which of the variants that have been observed will be chosen for onward transmission are considerably less well understood. This choice is generally influenced by individual’s own interests and biases such as a desire to identify with a social PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0282776 April 4, 2023 1 / 25 PLOS ONE Context congruence: How associative learning modulates cultural evolution Funding: AP was funded by a Heriot-Watt PhD Fellowship. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: NO authors have competing interests. group, and from values that emanate from social, educational and economic institutions [24, 25]. Anecdotally, influences of the social context are observed in, e.g., individuals who produce colloquial language learned from friends among friends and individually learned less-than perfect table manners when alone, but who produce impeccable language and table manners (learned from parents) in the presence of their children. Or who express their friends’ views to their peers, and their teachers’ views to their students. However, this question still requires empirical testing. This paper will use an experimental approach complemented by a computer simulation in the first study (to our knowledge) that addresses how selecting a cultural variant to transmit onwards is shaped by associative learning and context-congruence effects. 1.1 A new context-based transmission bias Human cultural transmission is highly biased [26]. Multiple studies have revealed and examined transmission biases and the strength of their effects on which variants individuals adopt and produce [12, 27–30]. Boyd and Richerson [15] distinguished three types of biases: content-based or direct bias, model-based bias and frequency-based biases (Fig 1a–1c), all of which involve a (biased) evaluation of different observed variants by a learner. The present study proposes and tests a different type of bias which does not presuppose evaluation on the part of learners or a preference for specific variants. Instead, it entails a simple conditioning effect based on congruence, or similarity, of the current context in which a variant is produced and the context in which it was observed and learned (Fig 1d). The role of context on learning is the focus of studies of transfer (see e.g. [31, 32] for reviews). There is transfer when something that is learned in a context or a domain is easily transferred or generalised to other domains. For example, when information that is learned in a class context is subsequently produced in a test context [33]. Transfer encompasses the assumption that what is learned in a social context carries over to other social contexts. This Fig 1. Three classic transmission biases and a new one. (a) Direct or content-based bias favours the adoption of variants depending on their perceived attractiveness, utility, ease etc. (b) Model-based bias favours variants depending on who produced (or modeled) those variants. (c) Frequency-based bias disproportionately favours variants that have high (or low) frequency. (d) Context-congruence or associative bias favours variants that are associated with t (...truncated)