The First International Workshop on Social Learning and Cultural Evolution is a satellite Workshop at the The Fifteenth International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems. ALIFE XV takes place in Cancun, Mexico, 4 to 8 July 2016 at the International Convention Center (CANCUN ICC).

The workshop will consist of a half day of presentations and will consist of two parts. The first half of this workshop aims to provide an interdisciplinary overview of the fields of social learning and cultural evolution. By doing this we hope to extend the scope of research in the social learning ALife community to incorporate more interdisciplinary concepts and provide a firm basis for interdisciplinary discussion and collaboration. We also hope to provide a robust background into social learning and cultural learning from multiple perspectives, which is aimed to help newcomers to the field in their initial research and to invigorate older researchers in the field to re­consider the bigger interdisciplinary questions that still exist in the field. Talks in this initial part of the workshop will include presentations from invited speakers and tutorials from experts from a range of fields. These fields include:

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• Theoretical (Population) Biology
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• Animal Behaviour
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• Social Science/Social Simulation
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• Evolutionary Robotics
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• Archaeology and Anthropology
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• Adaptive Behaviour
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• Agent Based Modelling

The second half of the workshop will involve short presentations from contributors on their work in the field (current or historical), collective research goals and milestones in social learning and cultural evolution, or to introduce new concepts, modelling techniques, or questions. Presenters are encouraged to address any of the following topics (though this list is not exhaustive).

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• Social Learning Mechanisms
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• Social Information Transfer
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• The interaction between social and non social learning
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• The interaction between learning and evolution
• Environmental Variability, Environmental Complexity, and Social Learning
• Social Learning Strategies
• Social Learning and Life History Evolution
• Models of Learning in Nature
• The Evolution of Culture
• Communication
• Social Networks and Social Contagion on networks
• Group structure and learning bias
• Social Robotics
• Grounded (Animat) models of Social Learning
• Do our definitions match those used in other related fields (i.e Imitation, Culture, ...)
• Human Cultural Evolution (Cumulative Culture)
• Co­operation
• Gene­Culture Co­Evolution/ Dual Inheritance Theory
• Philosophy of Culture
• Memetics

We ask potential contributors to submit an extended abstract (1 page). Authors of accepted submissions will present during the second half of the workshop. We are open to presenters who are contributing during the main ALife conference to also talk about this work during the workshop in order to have additional discussion. PhD students and young career academics who are new to the field are encouraged to submit to this workshop.