title: Cultural selection drives the evolution of human communication systems.
abstract: Human communication systems evolve culturally, but the evolutionary mechanisms that drive this evolution are not well understood. Against a baseline that communication variants spread in a population following neutral evolutionary dynamics (also known as drift models), we tested the role of two cultural selection models: coordination- and content-biased. We constructed a parametrized mixed probabilistic model of the spread of communicative variants in four 8-person laboratory micro-societies engaged in a simple communication game. We found that selectionist models, working in combination, explain the majority of the empirical data. The best-fitting parameter setting includes an egocentric bias and a content bias, suggesting that participants retained their own previously used communicative variants unless they encountered a superior (content-biased) variant, in which case it was adopted. This novel pattern of results suggests that (i) a theory of the cultural evolution of human communication systems must integrate selectionist models and (ii) human communication systems are functionally adaptive complex systems.
authors: School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9LL, UK.
authors: Monica
authors: M
authors: Tamariz
authors: School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, Crawley, Western Australia 6009, Australia.
authors: T Mark
authors: TM
authors: Ellison
authors: Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QB, UK.
authors: Dale J
authors: DJ
authors: Barr
authors: School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, Crawley, Western Australia 6009, Australia nicolas.fay@gmail.com.
authors: Nicolas
authors: N
authors: Fay
mesh_terms: D003142:Communication; D003468:Cultural Evolution; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008962:Models, Theoretical
keywords: content bias; coordination bias; cultural evolution; drift; language evolution; selection