Semantic knowledge guides innovation and drives cultural evolution 文章

arXiv:2510.12837v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Cultural evolution allows ideas and technologies to accumulate across generations, reaching their most complex and open-ended form in humans. While social learning enables the transmission of such innovations, the cognitive processes that generate them remain poorly understood. Classical theories typically treat innovation as random variation, a simplification insufficient for explaining the complexity of human cultural evolution. We propose that semantic knowledge-the associations linking concepts to their properties and functions-guides human innovation and drives cumulative culture. To test this, we combined an agent-based model, which examines how semantic knowledge shapes cultural evolutionary dynamics, with a large-scale behavioral experiment (N = 1,243) testing its role in human innovation.