Knowledge built culturally across generations allows humans to learn far more than an individual could glean from their own experience in a lifetime. Cultural knowledge in turn rests on language: language is the richest record of what previous generations believed, valued, and practiced. The power and mechanisms of language as a means of cultural learning, however, are not well understood. We take a first step towards reverse-engineering cultural learning through language. We developed a suite of complex high-stakes tasks in the form of minimalist-style video games, which we deployed in an iterated learning paradigm. Game participants were limited to only two attempts (two lives) to beat each game and were allowed to write a message to a future participant who read the message before playing. Knowledge accumulated gradually across generations, allowing later generations to advance further in the games and perform more efficient actions. Multigenerational learning followed a strikingly similar trajectory to individuals learning alone with an unlimited number of lives. These results suggest that language provides a sufficient medium to express and accumulate the knowledge people acquire in these diverse tasks: the dynamics of the environment, valuable goals, dangerous risks, and strategies for success. The video game paradigm we pioneer here is thus a rich test bed for theories of cultural transmission and learning from language.

中文翻译：

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跨代人在文化上增长知识，以解决新颖、复杂的任务

跨代文化建立的知识使人类能够学到的知识远远多于个人从一生的经验中收集的知识。文化知识反过来又依赖于语言：语言是前几代人所相信、重视和实践的最丰富的记录。然而，语言作为一种文化学习手段的力量和机制尚不清楚。我们迈出了通过语言逆向工程文化学习的第一步。我们以极简风格的视频游戏的形式开发了一套复杂的高风险任务，并将其部署在迭代学习范式中。游戏参与者仅限于两次尝试（两次生命）来击败每场游戏，并且被允许向未来的参与者写一条消息，该参与者在玩之前阅读该消息。知识代代相传，允许后代在游戏中进一步进步并执行更有效的行动。多代学习遵循的轨迹与个体在无限生命中单独学习的轨迹惊人地相似。这些结果表明，语言提供了一个足够的媒介来表达和积累人们在这些不同任务中获得的知识：环境的动态、有价值的目标、危险的风险和成功的策略。因此，我们在这里开创的视频游戏范式是文化传播和语言学习理论的丰富试验台。这些结果表明，语言提供了一个足够的媒介来表达和积累人们在这些不同任务中获得的知识：环境的动态、有价值的目标、危险的风险和成功的策略。因此，我们在这里开创的视频游戏范式是文化传播和语言学习理论的丰富试验台。这些结果表明，语言提供了一个足够的媒介来表达和积累人们在这些不同任务中获得的知识：环境的动态、有价值的目标、危险的风险和成功的策略。因此，我们在这里开创的视频游戏范式是文化传播和语言学习理论的丰富试验台。