Article

Language enables cumulative cultural improvement by transmitting mental models

2026-08-14

Abstract excerpt

<p>Human culture is distinguished by the accumulation of increasingly sophisticated knowledge of why things work, much of which cannot be readily recovered from observing successful behavior alone. How such knowledge is transmitted across generations remains poorly understood. We tested whether cumulative improvement depends on how knowledge is shared using a decision-making task governed by a hidden relational st...

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Literature Corpus work: d98b1de9-d270-5034-94de-6b5f97dc0195
DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/6u32q_v1

Open publication

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