Drawing is a cognitive tool that makes the invisible contents of mental life visible. Humans
use this tool to produce a remarkable variety of pictures, from realistic portraits to schematic …

Iterated learning describes the process whereby an individual learns their behaviour by
exposure to another individual's behaviour, who themselves learnt it in the same way. It can …

The method of serial reproduction has revealed that the social transmission of information is
characterized by the gradual transformation of the original message. This transformation …

The presence of divergent and independent research traditions in the gestural and vocal
domains of primate communication has resulted in major discrepancies in the definition and …

Music exhibits some cross-cultural similarities, despite its variety across the world. Evidence
from a broad range of human cultures suggests the existence of musical universals, here …

The paper surveys recent research on language evolution, focusing in particular on models
of cultural evolution and how they are being developed and tested using agent-based …

The historical origins of natural language cannot be observed directly. We can, however,
study systems that support language and we can also develop models that explore the …

The utility of our actions frequently depends upon the beliefs and behavior of other agents.
Thankfully, through experience, we learn norms and conventions that provide stable …

Human languages may be shaped not only by the (individual psychological) processes of
language acquisition, but also by population-level processes arising from repeated …

This paper compares two explanations of the process by which human communication
systems evolve: iterated learning and social collaboration. It then reports an experiment …