Many human cultural traits become increasingly beneficial as they are repeatedly transmitted, thanks to an accumulation of modifications made by successive generations. But how do later generations typically avoid modifications which revert traits to less beneficial forms already sampled and rejected by earlier generations? And how can later generations do so without direct exposure to their predecessors' behavior? One possibility is that learners are sensitive to cues of non‐random production in others' behavior, and that particular variants (e.g., those containing structural regularities unlikely to occur spontaneously) have been produced deliberately and with some effort. If this non‐random behavior is attributed to an informed strategy, then the learner may infer that apparent avoidance of certain possibilities indicates that these have already been sampled and rejected. This could potentially prevent performance plateaus resulting from learners modifying inherited behaviors randomly. We test this hypothesis in four experiments in which participants, either individually or in interacting dyads, attempt to locate rewards in a search grid, guided by partial information about another individual's experience of the task. We find that in some contexts, valid inferences about another's behavior can be made from partial information, and these inferences can be used in a way which facilitates trait adaptation. However, the benefit of these inferences appears to be limited, and in many contexts—including some which have the potential to make inferring the experience of another individual easier—there appears to be no benefit at all. We suggest that inferring previous behavior from partial social information plays a minimal role in the adaptation of cultural traits.

中文翻译：

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从部分社会信息推断行为在适应性特征的文化传播中起很小或没有作用

由于世代相传的修改积累，许多人类文化特征在反复传播时变得越来越有益。但是，后代通常如何避免将性状恢复为已被前几代采样和拒绝的不太有益的形式的修改？后代如何在不直接接触前辈行为的情况下做到这一点？一种可能性是学习者对他人行为中非随机产生的线索很敏感，并且特定的变体（例如，那些包含不太可能自发发生的结构规律的变体）是有意并经过一些努力产生的。如果这种非随机行为归因于明智的策略，那么学习者可能会推断出对某些可能性的明显回避表明这些可能性已经被抽样并拒绝了。这可能会防止由于学习者随机修改遗传行为而导致的表现停滞。我们在四个实验中测试了这个假设，在这些实验中，参与者，无论是单独的还是互动的二元组，都试图在搜索网格中找到奖励，并以有关另一个人的任务体验的部分信息为指导。我们发现在某些情况下，可以从部分信息中对他人的行为做出有效的推断，并且可以以促进特质适应的方式使用这些推断。然而，这些推论的好处似乎是有限的，并且在许多情况下——包括一些有可能使推断另一个人的经历变得更容易的情况——似乎根本没有任何好处。我们建议从部分社会信息推断以前的行为在适应文化特征中的作用很小。