Testing hypotheses about cumulative cultural evolution

Humans not only learn from others, but can also build on that knowledge. Cultural change therefore accumulates over generations, and we make use of many behaviours that we could not have invented by ourselves. This process, termed 'cumulative cultural evolution', has allowed us to develop powerful technologies and complex systems of communication, and may be unique to humans. Other animals' behaviour seems restricted to what they could have learned themselves through trial and error. In this project's experiments, people will be presented with particular challenges, eg. to create a paper aeroplane which will fly as far as possible, which they will carry out as part of a chain. The first member of the chain will receive no guidance regarding the task, but the second participant will be able to learn from the outcome of this first attempt. It is expected that designs will be increasingly successful further down the chain, as participants will be able to build on the accumulated knowledge of several previous learner 'generations'. Using such experiments, researchers hope to be able to draw conclusions about the information people need in order to engage in this kind of learning, and whether it depends on uniquely human cognitive mechanisms