Program (Tentative)
Tuesday July 30th 2019
9:00 11:30: Artificial Life 2019 Conference Sessions
11:30 12:55: SLACE SESSION 1
11:30 11:35 WELCOME
11:35 12:15 KEYNOTE - Dr Luke Rendell
Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution, St. Andrews University
12:15 12:25 Dr Aniko Ekhart
Aston Lab for Collective Intelligence Engineering, Aston University
Humanizing Social Learning
Social Learning and Cultural Evolution are closely interconnected established fields within Artificial Life. The modelling of social learning is mostly based on simple imitation or copying of actions, derived from observations of collectives in the animal world. This forms the basis for studying group behaviour and evolution. To bring Artificial Life closer to Real Life, we propose consideration and embedding of human characteristics, based on human psychology research as a key area of investigation for Social Learning and Cultural Evolution. In this talk, I'll present ideas for the WHAT, WHY and HOW of this challenge, based on discussions that I had with Ulysses Bernardet, Diego Faria and Peter Lewis, members of the Aston Lab for Intelligent Collectives Engineering (ALICE).
12:25 12:35 Dr Bess Price
Centre for Behaviour and Evolution, Newcastle University
12:35 12:45 Dr Reiji Suzuki
Artificial Life Lab, Nagoya University
Roles of social learning and physical niche construction on evolutionary novelty and diversity
We discuss two approaches to evolution of social learning and niche construction focusing on the emergence of novel traits and diversity. First, we introduce a simple agent-based evolutionary model of social and individual learning of multiple traits which are assumed to be related to both cognitive and communicative aspects of language abilities. We show that roles of these learning processes worked complementarily, which enabled the population to acquire complex and adaptive trait sets. Second, we introduce an evolutionary model of defensive strategies of artificial prey creatures in which they need to avoid predation by constructing physical structures composed of multiple objects in a 2D physically simulated environment. We show that there was a large variation in emerging adaptive structures, and ecological inheritance of environmental states from a parent creature affected the diversity of evolved adaptive structures.
12:45 12:55 Donna Kean and Gemma Mackintosh
Behaviour and Evolution Research Group, University of Stirling
A new method for comparing the potential for cumulative culture in adults, children and non-human species.
Experimental tests of capacities for cumulative cultural evolution in nonhuman species and children are rare. Given the current interest in cumulative culture and the theoretical implications associated with finding related capacities in nonhumans and young children, this deficit is surprising. Traditional methods for identifying cumulative culture in the lab have involved recruiting hundreds of participants who are organised into generations of learners in transmission chains. The same task is performed by each participant with the output of earlier generations being shown to later ones, thus allowing positive evidence of cumulative culture to be generated, as has been shown in adults. However, implementing these methods carries logistical challenges that are particularly relevant to developmental and non-human research e.g. in terms of access to large populations and suitable experimental control. This presents problems for generating the capacity for cumulative culture more broadly, and consequently in assessing possible supporting cognitive mechanisms. We suggest an alternative approach for testing capacities for cumulative culture which does not require large numbers of participants. By exposing individuals to vicarious (i.e. information not generated by themselves) information from a range of task performances, we can infer the outcome of repeated transmission events from the responses of single individuals. This approach greatly reduces the sample sizes typically required for transmission chain studies. We will discuss some of the experiments undertaken by our lab group using this method dubbed the PFR (potential for ratcheting). We plan to use these studies to facilitate direct comparisons of potential for cumulative culture between populations, including nonhuman primates and children.