Call For Papers

This is a call for abstracts for the First International Workshop on “Social Learning and Cultural Evolution (SlaCE)”, which will be held at ALIFE XV in Cancun, Mexico.

The first half of this workshop aims to provide an interdisciplinary overview of the fields of social learning and cultural evolution. By doing this we hope to extend the scope of research in the social learning ALife community to incorporate more interdisciplinary concepts and provide a firm basis for interdisciplinary discussion and collaboration. We also hope to provide a robust background for research on social learning and cultural evolution from multiple perspectives. This is aimed to help newcomers to the field in their initial research and to invigorate established researchers in the field to re-consider the bigger interdisciplinary questions of the field. In the first half of the workshop we will have talks by invited speakers and tutorials by experts in a range of relevant fields.

The second half of the workshop will consist of short presentations from contributors on their work in the field (current or historical), collective research goals and milestones in social learning and cultural evolution or new concepts, modelling techniques or research questions. Presenters are encouraged to address any of the following topics (though this list is not exhaustive)."

Social Learning Mechanisms

Social Information Transfer

The interaction between social and non social learning

The interaction between learning and evolution

Environmental Variability, Environmental Complexity, and Social Learning

Social Learning Strategies

Social Learning and Life History Evolution

Models of Learning in Nature

The Evolution of Culture

Communication

Social Networks and Social Contagion on networks

Group structure and learning bias

Social Robotics

Grounded (Animat) models of Social Learning

Do our definitions match those used in other related fields (i.e Imitation, Culture, ...)

Human Cultural Evolution (Cumulative Culture)

Co-operation

Gene-Culture Co-Evolution/ Dual Inheritance Theory

Philosophy of Culture

Memetics

The workshop will conclude with an open discussion on future of Social Learning and Cultural Evolution research in ALife.

We ask potential contributors to submit an extended abstract (1 page). Authors of accepted submissions will present during the second half of the workshop. We are open to presenters who are contributing during the main ALife conference to also talk about this work during the workshop in order to have additional discussion. PhD students and young career academics who are new to the field are encouraged to submit to this workshop.