The Cognitive Bases of Culture and Cumulative Cultural Evolution : A Literature Review

Culture is a set of information acquired through social transmission. Human cultures are more complex than in other species. This is due to cultural evolution, which appears to be cumulative for human beings : cultural traits are progressively improved or replaced by better ones through generations of individuals with a minimum of loss. Many experimental studies investigated the origins of that phenomenon, focusing on socio-cognitive factors that might lead to its emergence in a group. The first studies in that field advocated for social high-fidelity transmission, which facilitates the preservation of cultural traits through time, thus enabling populations to create new practices from the old ones. However, more recent studies have showed that cultural evolution could emerge in some non-human species - sometimes in a cumulative fashion, that high-fidelity transmission is not a fundamental factor for cumulative culture and that some other factors, both psychological (physical intelligence, mental flexibility) and social (communication, teaching), may play a more important role.