Learning to solve complex tasks by growing knowledge culturally across generations

Understand

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, and how these evolved over time.
• The power and mechanisms of language as a means of cultural learning, however, are not well understood, and as a result, current AI systems do not leverage language as a means for cultural knowledge transmission.
• Here, we take a first step towards reverse-engineering cultural learning through language.