Cultural Learning

We study how individuals acquire information from others and from culturally structured environments. This includes work on social learning in infancy, the developmental foundations of social learning in great apes, cumulative cultural evolution in chimpanzees, and cross-cultural research on the universals and diversity of human social learning. Across this area, developmental research examines how learning strategies and sensitivities to social information change over ontogeny, cross-cultural research investigates how local social worlds shape the flexibility, persistence, and use of socially acquired knowledge, and comparative research clarifies which forms of learning are shared across species and which support uniquely human cultural accumulation. Together, this work explains how minds form social worlds through social transmission, group life, and cultural experience.