Human technology has evolved in an unparalleled way, allowing us to expand across the globe. One fascinating question is, how do we understand the cognitive origins of this phenomenon, which is known as cumulative technological culture (CTC)? The dominant view posits that CTC results from our unique ability to learn from each other. The cultural niche hypothesis even minimizes the involvement of non-social cognitive skills in the emergence of CTC, claiming that technologies can be optimized without us understanding how they work, but simply through the retention of small improvements over generations. Here we conduct a partial replication of the experimental study of Derex et al. (Nature Human Behaviour, 2019) and show that the improvement of a physical system over generations is accompanied by an increased understanding of it. These findings indicate that technical-reasoning skills (non-social cognitive skills) are important in the acquisition, understanding and improvement of technical content—that is, specific to the technological form of cumulative culture—thereby making social learning a salient source of technical inspiration.

人类技术以前所未有的方式发展，使我们能够在全球范围内扩张。一个引人入胜的问题是，我们如何理解这种被称为累积技术文化 (CTC) 的现象的认知起源？主流观点认为，CTC 源于我们独特的相互学习能力。文化利基假说甚至将非社会认知技能在 CTC 出现中的参与降至最低，声称技术可以在我们不了解它们如何工作的情况下进行优化，而只需通过几代人之间保留小的改进。在这里，我们对 Derex 等人的实验研究进行了部分复制。(自然 人类行为, 2019) 并表明物理系统世代相传的改进伴随着对它的理解的增加。这些发现表明，技术推理技能（非社会认知技能）对于技术内容的获取、理解和改进很重要——即特定于累积文化的技术形式——从而使社会学习成为技术灵感的重要来源.