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FriSem

Date
Fri May 24th 2024, 3:15 - 4:30pm
Location
Psychology, Building 420, room 050

Ben Prystawski, 3rd-year PhD candidate with Associate Professor Noah Goodman, Department of Psychology, Stanford University

Title: Communication capacity constrains cultural learnability

Abstract: Humans are unique among species in our ability to thrive in environments around the world. We owe much of our success to the ability to learn cumulatively over generations. Understanding what about humans enables us to do this is a key problem for cognitive science. There are several accounts of the mechanisms that drive cultural learning, including attention to others and heuristics about who to learn from. These posited mechanisms are all ways of transmitting information from one generation to the next. In this talk, I will present a formal model of cultural learning based in information theory. In our model, individual agents learn via Bayesian inference then pass their posterior distributions over a rate-limited channel. Through simulations, I show that quantitative differences in the rate of communication give rise to qualitative differences in what is and is not learnable. I will also present preliminary experimental results in which we attempt to manipulate the rate of human communication via time limits on message writing.