July 21, 2010 –
To celebrate its 350th anniversary, the Royal Society last month hosted “Culture Evolves,” a London-based conference focused on the notion that culture is more important to animals than previously believed.
Twenty four international experts presented talks on the topic. Among them was Derek Lyons, informatics assistant project scientist and CALIT2 affiliate.
Lyons, who collaborates with Bill Tomlinson in the Interactive Animation Lab on the KarunaTree project, presented research compiled during his dissertation work at Yale University. He discussed a key phenomenon in the transmission of human culture known as “over-imitation,” the tendency for young children to copy actions of adults even when it is not critical to achieving a goal.
Rather than over-imitating to please adults, as some have hypothesized, Lyons found children engage in “automatic causal encoding” (ACE), a behavior based on assumptions that the adult knows what s/he is doing and that each of the steps s/he takes is necessary.
His work, along with that of other cultural evolution researchers, was highlighted in the July 16 issue of Science magazine, an international weekly journal published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
The article closes by quoting a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London who concurs with Lyons,calling the behaviors he describes “the secret of the evolution of human culture.”
