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 amount of loss. Many experimental studies have investigated the origins of this phenomenon, focusing on socio-cognitive factors that might lead to its emergence in a group. The first studies in this field advocated for high-fidelity social transmission, which facilitates the preservation of cultural traits through time, thus enabling populations to create new practices from old ones. However, more recent studies have shown 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.