Adaptive challenges for cognition underlying cultural learning

In this chapter we review accumulating research on the social learning mechanisms that power cultural evolution. We begin by outlining some adaptive challenges that learners face, emphasizing cases of individual learning. Many of these challenges are shared with social learning, but it also helps highlight the circumstances under which social learning is particularly valuable. We then turn to the specific inferential challenges that must be addressed by cognitive mechanisms for social learning. We review several proposed heuristics that humans and other animals use to extract information from conspecifics, while considering how they deal with each inferential challenge. We finish by describing some of the big debates regarding the cognition underlying cultural capacities in humans and how they provide avenues for future research.