Article
Ecology
Ehud Lamm, Oren Kolodny
Summary: Species' adaptation to their environments can occur through various mechanisms, including genetic adaptations and non-traditional inheritance mechanisms. This article proposes a new modality of eco-evolutionary dynamics called distributed adaptation, where adaptation is not conferred by individuals but by the structural or compositional aspects of the population. The article discusses the factors that influence the storage of adaptive information in a distributed way.
FRONTIERS IN ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
(2022)
Article
Biology
Gabriele Valentini, Theodore P. Pavlic, Sara Imari Walker, Stephen C. Pratt, Dora Biro, Takao Sasaki, Irene Giardina
Summary: Through studying homing pigeons, researchers found that group-living animals can pass route information down to inexperienced individuals through behavioral traditions. Finding a balance between exploration and exploitation of social information is crucial in preventing the spread of maladaptive traditions, with the level of experience affecting an individual's contribution to the exploration-exploitation trade-off.
Review
Neurosciences
Delwin T. Lindsey, Angela M. Brown
Summary: Although the number of color terms varies greatly across languages, the lexical color categories are similar worldwide. Evidence from psychological, linguistic, and computational studies has advanced our understanding of how color categories come into being and influence color perception and cognition.
ANNUAL REVIEW OF VISION SCIENCE, VOL 7, 2021
(2021)
Review
Biology
Robin Schimmelpfennig, Layla Razek, Eric Schnell, Michael Muthukrishna
Summary: Human societies function as collective brains, where cultural brains seek adaptive knowledge and transmit solutions. Innovations emerge through transmission of mistakes, improvements, and recombination. The rate of innovation depends on society's size, interconnectedness, fidelity of information transmission, and cultural trait diversity. Diversity empowers innovation but also poses coordination and communication challenges.
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
(2022)
Article
History & Philosophy Of Science
Richard Moore
Summary: Uniquely human forms of 'Theory of Mind' are a result of cultural evolution, with propositional attitude psychology being a linguistically constructed folk model of the human mind. These folk models provide humans with new tools for thinking and reasoning about mental states, without jeopardizing the explanation of language development.
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Lilia Rissman, Laura Horton, Susan Goldin-Meadow
Summary: Languages vary in how they categorize events involving tools, but this study examined if there are universal constraints on this categorization. Descriptions of tool events from hearing adult speakers of English, Spanish, and Chinese, as well as deaf child homesigners from five different countries, showed alignment in the language used. This suggests that there may be a universal constraint on how events involving tools are categorized in language.
PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Chemistry, Physical
Nuno A. M. Araujo, Liesbeth M. C. Janssen, Thomas Barois, Guido Boffetta, Itai Cohen, Alessandro Corbetta, Olivier Dauchot, Marjolein Dijkstra, William M. Durham, Audrey Dussutour, Simon Garnier, Hanneke Gelderblom, Ramin Golestanian, Lucio Isa, Gijsje H. Koenderink, Hartmut Loewen, Ralf Metzler, Marco Polin, C. Patrick Royall, Andela Saric, Anupam Sengupta, Cecile Sykes, Vito Trianni, Idan Tuval, Nicolas Vogel, Julia M. Yeomans, Iker Zuriguel, Alvaro Marin, Giorgio Volpe
Summary: Self-organisation is the spontaneous emergence of spatio-temporal structures and patterns from the interaction of smaller individual units. Confinement can mediate and control self-organisation by limiting the translational and rotational degrees of freedom, acting as a catalyst or inhibitor. By constraining the self-organisation process in soft-matter systems, confinement can actively steer the emergence or suppression of collective phenomena in space and time.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Iain G. Johnston, Kamaludin Dingle, Sam F. Greenbury, Chico Q. Camargo, Jonathan P. K. Doye, Sebastian E. Ahnert, Ard A. Louis
Summary: Engineers design modular and symmetric systems to increase robustness and facilitate alterations. Similarly, biological structures also exhibit modularity and symmetry, but the origin of these trends is not well understood. This study introduces a nonadaptive hypothesis based on an algorithmic perspective, suggesting that the preference for symmetric structures is not only driven by natural selection, but also by the lower information complexity required to encode them. Extensive biological data support this hypothesis, showing an exponential bias towards simpler and more symmetric phenotypes in protein complexes, RNA secondary structures, and gene regulatory networks. Lower descriptional complexity also correlates with higher mutational robustness.
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
(2022)
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Rafael Ventura, Joshua B. Plotkin, Gareth Roberts
Summary: Research suggests that low-frequency words undergo regularization at a higher rate, possibly due to drift. This finding further supports the idea that drift may be a major driver of language change.
Article
Biology
Lior Baltiansky, Guy Frankel, Ofer Feinerman
Summary: Ant colonies regulate foraging based on their collective hunger, but the mechanism behind this distributed regulation is unclear. Previous research showed that the frequency of foraging events decreases linearly with colony satiation. New analysis suggests that foragers tend to move towards the depth of the nest when their food load is high and towards the nest exit when it is low, instead of making an explicit decision to exit. The colony shapes the foragers' trajectories by controlling their unloading rate, while the foragers only sense their current food load.
Article
Biology
Simon Kirby, Monica Tamariz
Summary: This study investigates the emergence of the combinatorial structure of language through an agent-based model and population dynamics. The results suggest that the pressures for simplicity and expressivity during cultural transmission lead to the emergence of combinatoriality. Additionally, population dynamics affect the rate of evolution.
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
(2022)
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Abby Chopoorian, Yakov Pichkar, Nicole Creanza
Summary: Language is crucial for human understanding, but its origin and evolution remain a challenge. Researchers study birdsong divergence to uncover cultural evolution patterns. Understanding how learning and cultural traits interact at the population level is important for studying cultural evolution.
FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
(2021)
Article
Physics, Fluids & Plasmas
Daniel Geiss, Klaus Kroy, Viktor Holubec
Summary: The retardation between sensation and action has an impact on swarm models, affecting the ability of swarms to follow a leader, the spreading of information through the swarm, and the change in the orientation parameter. The effects vary with the length of the delay, the speed, and the conservation of orientation.
Article
Construction & Building Technology
Yoonhwa Jung, Julia Hockenmaier, Mani Golparvar-Fard
Summary: This study introduces a transformer-based natural language processing model, UNIfORMATBRIDGE, that automatically labels activities in a project schedule with Uniformat classification. Experimental results show that the model performs well in matching unstructured schedule data to Uniformat classifications. Additionally, the study highlights the importance of this method in developing new techniques.
AUTOMATION IN CONSTRUCTION
(2024)
Article
Public, Environmental & Occupational Health
Jingyuan Shi, Hye Kyung Kim, Charles T. Salmon, Edson C. Tandoc Jr, Zhang Hao Goh
Summary: This study examines the influence of individual and collective norms on COVID-19 vaccination intention across eight Asian countries. The findings reveal nuanced patterns of how individual and collective social norms influence health behavioral decisions, depending on the degree of cultural tightness-looseness.
SOCIAL SCIENCE & MEDICINE
(2024)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
David Hirshleifer, Joshua B. Plotkin
Summary: Biased information about others' payoffs can drive innovation, risk taking, and investment booms. Observers tend to focus more on large successes than small ones. This cultural phenomenon may lead to companies becoming overly optimistic, resulting in irrational booms in adoption.
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
(2021)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Arunas L. Radzvilavicius, Taylor A. Kessinger, Joshua B. Plotkin
Summary: The study presents a social model exploring how adherence to a public institution of moral assessment can promote cooperation in societies where individuals are responsible for evaluating the reputations of their peers. The results show that eliminating disagreements about reputations through public monitoring can increase cooperation rates.
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
(2021)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Qi Su, Benjamin Allen, Joshua B. Plotkin
Summary: This article discusses the emergence of cooperation in human societies and proposes the possibility of cooperation in directed social networks. The study found that even without the opportunity for reciprocation, cooperation can still be favored in networks with a certain proportion of unidirectional interactions.
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
(2022)
Article
Psychology, Biological
Qi Su, Alex McAvoy, Yoichiro Mori, Joshua B. Plotkin
Summary: This study uses multilayer networks to investigate the influence of multiple domains of social interactions on individual behavior. The findings suggest that coupling between layers promotes prosocial behavior simultaneously in all layers.
NATURE HUMAN BEHAVIOUR
(2022)
Article
Psychology, Biological
Mitchell G. Newberry, Joshua B. Plotkin
Summary: Newberry and Plotkin demonstrate the influence of frequency on the copying tendency of a cultural trait. They introduce a method to measure this frequency-dependent selection and analyze the dynamics and diversity of first names and dog breed preferences across different countries and cultures.
NATURE HUMAN BEHAVIOUR
(2022)
Article
Linguistics
Yosiane White, Gareth Roberts
Summary: Like other Celtic languages, Welsh exhibits initial consonant mutation triggered by lexical and morphosyntactic factors. This study investigates speakers' expectations regarding soft-mutation triggers using an online survey. The results show that most respondents expect variation, but can be grouped into conservative and variable clusters based on their expectations. The study also finds that L2 Welsh speakers are more accepting of noncanonical mutation compared to L1 Welsh speakers. Additionally, different triggers may not be identical for all speakers, and trigger transparency may affect variability.
GLOSSA-A JOURNAL OF GENERAL LINGUISTICS
(2022)
Article
Linguistics
Masha Fedzechkina, Lucy Hall Hartley, Gareth Roberts
Summary: Language structure is shaped by biases for efficient communication of semantic meaning as well as social pressures. This study investigates how these biases interact in language change using a miniature language paradigm. The findings suggest that social biases can lead to linguistic systems that are less efficient at communicating semantic meaning.
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
(2023)
Article
Ecology
Debora Princepe, Marcus A. M. de Aguiar, Joshua B. Plotkin
Summary: Mitochondrial and nuclear genomes must co-adapt for proper cellular respiration and energy production. Strong selection for mito-nuclear compatibility affects species diversity, speciation rates, and extinction rates, explaining the lower species diversity and higher speciation/extinction rates in temperate regions compared to the tropics.
NATURE ECOLOGY & EVOLUTION
(2022)
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Rafael Ventura, Joshua B. Plotkin, Gareth Roberts
Summary: Research suggests that low-frequency words undergo regularization at a higher rate, possibly due to drift. This finding further supports the idea that drift may be a major driver of language change.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Guocheng Wang, Qi Su, Long Wang, Joshua B. Plotkin
Summary: This passage mainly discusses the concept of fitness in evolution, which quantifies the expected number of offspring an individual will produce. The actual number of offspring is also influenced by stochasticity associated with birth and death processes. In nature, individuals with higher fecundity tend to have greater variance in their offspring number. The authors develop a model for the evolution of two types competing in a population of nonconstant size and show that large offspring variance can reverse the direction of evolution and favor cooperation.
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
(2023)
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Gareth Roberts, Robin Clark
Summary: Why do phonologies exhibit greater dispersion than expected? A study using a non-linguistic communication game found that above-chance levels of dispersion emerged as a result of production and perception demands on participants. The study revealed that dispersion was not planned from the start, but emerged as a consequence of smaller-scale choices and adjustments.
FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
(2023)
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Aini Li, Gareth Roberts
Summary: We investigated the emergence of sociolinguistic indexicality using an artificial-language-learning paradigm. Results show ready formation of first-order indexicality based on co-occurrence alone, with higher-order indexicality emerging as a result of extension to new speaker groups, modulated by the perceived practical importance of the indexed social feature.
Article
Linguistics
Aja Altenhof, Gareth Roberts
Summary: How much information is needed for language users to differentiate potentially absolute synonyms into near-synonyms? Our experiments show that there is a tendency for verbs to become differentiated by context even when the information about context is inconsistent, random, or neutral. The results suggest that the quality of input may be more important than quantity in the differentiation of synonyms.
LANGUAGE AND COGNITION
(2023)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Anzhi Sheng, Qi Su, Aming Li, Long Wang, Joshua B. Plotkin
Summary: This paper proposes a method to construct temporal networks that match a given activity pattern, and applies it to empirical bursty patterns. The method ensures desired target inter-event time distributions for individual nodes and links, regardless of whether the underlying topology is static or time-varying.
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
(2023)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Qi Su, Alex McAvoy, Joshua B. Plotkin
Summary: This study explores how social interactions and the identity of opponents impact the emergence and stability of prosocial behavior. The research finds that human beings' sophisticated cognitive abilities allow them to adapt their behavior based on social context and the identity of their opponents. It is revealed that contextualized behavior significantly enhances cooperation, even in populations with a small number of social contexts. Increasing the number of social contexts further greatly promotes cooperation.
