Many Mickles Make a Muckle: Evidence That Gender Stereotypes Reemerge Spontaneously Via Cultural Evolution.

We explore whether societal gender stereotypes re-emerge as social information is repeatedly passed from person to person. We examined whether peoples' memories of personality attributes associated with female and male social targets became increasingly consistent with societal gender stereotypes as information was passed down social transmission chains. After passing through the memories of just four generations of participants, our initially gender-balanced micro-societies became rife with traditional gender stereotypes.

Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Perspective-taking in a language game.

Many theories of communication claim that perspective-taking is a fundamental component of the successful design of utterances for a specific audience. In three experiments, we investigated perspective-taking in a constrained communication situation: Participants played a word guessing game where each trial required them to select a clue word to communicate a single target word to their partner. In many cases, the task requires participants to take the perspective of their partner when generating, evaluating, and selecting potential clue words.

Two-Year-Olds' Eye Movements Reflect Confidence in Their Understanding of Words.

We studied the fundamental issue of whether children evaluate the reliability of their language interpretation, that is, their confidence in understanding words. In two experiments, 2-year-olds (Experiment 1: = 50; Experiment 2: = 60) saw two objects and heard one of them being named; both objects were then hidden behind screens and children were asked to look toward the named object, which was eventually revealed. When children knew the label used, they showed increased postdecision persistence after a correct compared with an incorrect anticipatory look, a marker of confidence in word comprehension (Experiment 1).

Probability matching is not the default decision making strategy in human and non-human primates.

Probability matching has long been taken as a prime example of irrational behaviour in human decision making; however, its nature and uniqueness in the animal world is still much debated. In this paper we report a set of four preregistered experiments testing adult humans and Guinea baboons on matched probability learning tasks, manipulating task complexity (binary or ternary prediction tasks) and reinforcement procedures (with and without corrective feedback). Our findings suggest that probability matching behaviour within primate species is restricted to humans and the simplest possible binary prediction tasks; utility-maximising is seen in more complex tasks for humans as pattern-search becomes more effortful, and we observe it across the board in baboons, altogether suggesting that it is a cognitively less demanding strategy.

The Impact of Information Structure on the Emergence of Differential Object Marking: An Experimental Study.

Many languages exhibit differential object marking (DOM), where only certain types of grammatical objects are marked with morphological cases. Traditionally, it has been claimed that DOM arises as a way to prevent ambiguity by marking objects that might otherwise be mistaken for subjects (e.g.

Speakers Align With Their Partner's Overspecification During Interaction.

Speakers often overspecify by encoding more information than is necessary when referring to an object (e.g., "the blue mug" for the only mug in a group of objects).

Conceptual Similarity and Communicative Need Shape Colexification: An Experimental Study.

Colexification refers to the phenomenon of multiple meanings sharing one word in a language. Cross-linguistic lexification patterns have been shown to be largely predictable, as similar concepts are often colexified. We test a recent claim that, beyond this general tendency, communicative needs play an important role in shaping colexification patterns.

Knowing How You Know: Toddlers Reevaluate Words Learned From an Unreliable Speaker.

There has been little investigation of the way source monitoring, the ability to track the source of one's knowledge, may be involved in lexical acquisition. In two experiments, we tested whether toddlers (mean age 30 months) can monitor the source of their lexical knowledge and reevaluate their implicit belief about a word mapping when this source is proven to be unreliable. Experiment 1 replicated previous research (Koenig & Woodward, 2010): children displayed better performance in a word learning test when they learned words from a speaker who has previously revealed themself as reliable (correctly labeling familiar objects) as opposed to an unreliable labeler (incorrectly labeling familiar objects).

The emergence of word-internal repetition through iterated learning: Explaining the mismatch between learning biases and language design.

The idea that natural language is shaped by biases in learning plays a key role in our understanding of how human language is structured, but its corollary that there should be a correspondence between typological generalisations and ease of acquisition is not always supported. For example, natural languages tend to avoid close repetitions of consonants within a word, but developmental evidence suggests that, if anything, words containing sound repetitions are more, not less, likely to be acquired than those without. In this study, we use word-internal repetition as a test case to provide a cultural evolutionary explanation of when and how learning biases impact on language design.

Non-adjacent Dependency Learning in Humans and Other Animals.

Learning and processing natural language requires the ability to track syntactic relationships between words and phrases in a sentence, which are often separated by intervening material. These nonadjacent dependencies can be studied using artificial grammar learning paradigms and structured sequence processing tasks. These approaches have been used to demonstrate that human adults, infants and some nonhuman animals are able to detect and learn dependencies between nonadjacent elements within a sequence.

Perspective-taking is spontaneous but not automatic.

Data from a range of different experimental paradigms-in particular (but not only) the dot perspective task-have been interpreted as evidence that humans automatically track the perspective of other individuals. Results from other studies, however, have cast doubt on this interpretation, and some researchers have suggested that phenomena that seem like perspective-taking might instead be the products of simpler behavioural rules. The issue remains unsettled in significant part because different schools of thought, with different theoretical perspectives, implement the experimental tasks in subtly different ways, making direct comparisons difficult.

Simplicity and informativeness in semantic category systems.

Recent research has shown that semantic category systems, such as color and kinship terms, find an optimal balance between simplicity and informativeness. We argue that this situation arises through pressure for simplicity from learning and pressure for informativeness from communicative interaction, two distinct pressures that often (but not always) pull in opposite directions. Another account argues that learning might also act as a pressure for informativeness, that learners might be biased toward inferring informative systems.

Interaction Promotes the Adaptation of Referential Conventions to the Communicative Context.

Coordination between speakers in dialogue requires balancing repetition and change, the old and the new. Interlocutors tend to reuse established forms, relying on communicative precedents. Yet linguistic interaction also necessitates adaptation to changing contexts or dynamic tasks, which might favor abandoning existing precedents in favor of better communicative alternatives.

Evolving artificial sign languages in the lab: From improvised gesture to systematic sign.

Recent work on emerging sign languages provides evidence for how key properties of linguistic systems are created. Here we use laboratory experiments to investigate the contribution of two specific mechanisms-interaction and transmission-to the emergence of a manual communication system in silent gesturers. We show that the combined effects of these mechanisms, rather than either alone, maintain communicative efficiency, and lead to a gradual increase of regularity and systematic structure.

High-fidelity copying is not necessarily the key to cumulative cultural evolution: a study in monkeys and children.

The unique cumulative nature of human culture has often been explained by high-fidelity copying mechanisms found only in human social learning. However, transmission chain experiments in human and non-human primates suggest that cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) might not necessarily depend on high-fidelity copying after all. In this study, we test whether defining properties of CCE can emerge in a non-copying task.

The cognitive roots of regularization in language.

Regularization occurs when the output a learner produces is less variable than the linguistic data they observed. In an artificial language learning experiment, we show that there exist at least two independent sources of regularization bias in cognition: a domain-general source based on cognitive load and a domain-specific source triggered by linguistic stimuli. Both of these factors modulate how frequency information is encoded and produced, but only the production-side modulations result in regularization (i.

Adult Learning and Language Simplification.

Languages spoken in larger populations are relatively simple. A possible explanation for this is that languages with a greater number of speakers tend to also be those with higher proportions of non-native speakers, who may simplify language during learning. We assess this explanation for the negative correlation between population size and linguistic complexity in three experiments, using artificial language learning techniques to investigate both the simplifications made by individual adult learners and the potential for such simplifications to influence group-level language characteristics.

How Culture and Biology Interact to Shape Language and the Language Faculty.

Recent work suggests that linguistic structure develops through cultural evolution, as a consequence of the repeated cycle of learning and use by which languages persist. This work has important implications for our understanding of the evolution of the cognitive basis for language; in particular, human language and the cognitive capacities underpinning it are likely to have been shaped by co-evolutionary processes, where the cultural evolution of linguistic systems is shaped by and in turn shapes the biological evolution of the capacities underpinning language learning. I review several models of this co-evolutionary process, which suggest that the precise relationship between evolved biases in individuals and the structure of linguistic systems depends on the extent to which cultural evolution masks or unmasks individual-level cognitive biases from selection.

Contextual predictability shapes signal autonomy.

Aligning on a shared system of communication requires senders and receivers reach a balance between simplicity, where there is a pressure for compressed representations, and informativeness, where there is a pressure to be communicatively functional. We investigate the extent to which these two pressures are governed by contextual predictability: the amount of contextual information that a sender can estimate, and therefore exploit, in conveying their intended meaning. In particular, we test the claim that contextual predictability is causally related to signal autonomy: the degree to which a signal can be interpreted in isolation, without recourse to contextual information.

Context and Perceptual Salience Influence the Formation of Novel Stereotypes via Cumulative Cultural Evolution.

We use a transmission chain method to establish how context and category salience influence the formation of novel stereotypes through cumulative cultural evolution. We created novel alien targets by combining features from three category dimensions-color, movement, and shape-thereby creating social targets that were individually unique but that also shared category membership with other aliens (e.g.

Psychobiological responses to critically evaluated multitasking.

In order to understand psychobiological responses to stress it is necessary to observe how people react to controlled stressors. A range of stressors exist for this purpose; however, laboratory stressors that are representative of real life situations provide more ecologically valid opportunities for assessing stress responding. The current study assessed psychobiological responses to an ecologically valid laboratory stressor involving multitasking and critical evaluation.

Zipf's Law of Abbreviation and the Principle of Least Effort: Language users optimise a miniature lexicon for efficient communication.

The linguist George Kingsley Zipf made a now classic observation about the relationship between a word's length and its frequency; the more frequent a word is, the shorter it tends to be. He claimed that this "Law of Abbreviation" is a universal structural property of language. The Law of Abbreviation has since been documented in a wide range of human languages, and extended to animal communication systems and even computer programming languages.