Although the theoretical foundations of the modern field of cultural evolution have been in place for over 50 y, laboratory experiments specifically designed to test cultural evolutionary theory have only existed for the last two decades. Here, we review the main experimental designs used in the field of cultural evolution, as well as major findings related to the generation of cultural variation, content- and model-based biases, cumulative cultural evolution, and nonhuman culture. We then identify methodological advances that demonstrate the iterative improvement of cultural evolution experimental methods. Finally, we focus on one common critique of cultural evolution experiments, the appropriate individual learning control condition needed to demonstrate cumulative culture, and present an original experimental investigation relevant to this critique. Participants completed a combinatorial innovation task allowing for cumulative improvement over time in one of four commonly used experimental designs/conditions: social learners in chains, social learners in groups, individual learners experiencing an extended session lasting the same accumulated time as an entire chain or group, and individual learners experiencing repeated sessions adding up to the same total time. We found that repeated individual learning resulted in superior performance to any other condition. We discuss these findings in light of the relevance of the specific criticism of previous experimental studies that purport to have demonstrated cumulative culture. We also use our findings to discuss the broad trade-offs that participants face when learning individually and socially in different contexts, including variable acquisition costs, redundancy of effort in groups, and cognitive and motivational fatigue.

中文翻译：

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文化进化实验研究中的权衡、控制条件和替代设计


尽管现代文化进化论领域的理论基础已经存在了 50 多年，但专门为测试文化进化论而设计的实验室实验只存在于最近二十年。在这里，我们回顾了文化进化领域使用的主要实验设计，以及与文化差异的产生、基于内容和模型的偏见、累积文化进化和非人类文化相关的主要发现。然后，我们确定了证明文化进化实验方法迭代改进的方法学进展。最后，我们专注于对文化进化实验的一个常见批评，即证明累积文化所需的适当个体学习控制条件，并提出了与该批评相关的原始实验调查。参与者完成了一项组合创新任务，允许在四种常用实验设计/条件之一中随着时间的推移进行累积改进：链中的社交学习者、小组中的社交学习者、经历与整个链或小组相同的累积时间的延长会话的个体学习者，以及经历重复会话的个体学习者加起来相同的总时间。我们发现，重复的个体学习导致优于任何其他条件的表现。我们根据对先前实验研究的具体批评的相关性来讨论这些发现，这些研究声称已经证明了累积文化。 我们还利用我们的发现来讨论参与者在不同环境中进行个人和社交学习时面临的广泛权衡，包括可变的获取成本、团队中的冗余努力以及认知和动机疲劳。