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Overview
Cultural learning is the way a group of people or animals within a society or culture tend to learn and pass on information. Learning styles are greatly influenced by how a culture socializes with its children and young people. Cross-cultural research in the past fifty years has primarily focused on differences between Eastern and Western cultures (Chang, et al., 2010). Some scholars believe that cultural learning differences may be responses to the physical environment in the areas in which a culture was initially founded (Chang, et al., 2010). These environmental differences include climate, migration patterns, war, agricultural suitability, and endemic pathogens. Cultural evolution, upon which cultural learning is built, is believed to be a product of only the past 10,000 years and to hold little connection to genetics (Chang, et al., 2010).

Cultural learning allows individuals to acquire skills that they would be unable to independently over the course of their lifetimes (Van Schaik & Burkart, 2011). Cultural learning is believed to be particularly important for humans. Humans are weaned at an early age compared to the emergence of adult dentition (MacDonald, 2007). The immaturity of dentition and the digestive system, the time required for growth of the brain, the rapid skeleton growth needed for the young to reach adult height and strength means that children have special digestive needs and are dependent on adults for a long period of time (MacDonald, 2007). This time of dependence also allows time for cultural learning to occur before passage into adulthood.

On the basis of cultural learning, people create, remember, and deal with ideas. They understand and apply specific systems of symbolic meaning. Cultures have been compared to sets of control mechanisms, plans, recipes, rules, or instructions. Cultural differences have been found in academic motivation, achievement, learning style, conformity, and compliance (Chang, et al., 2010). Cultural learning is dependent on innovation or the ability to create new responses to the environment and the ability to communicate or imitate the behavior of others (Lehmann, Feldman & Kaeuffer, 2010). Animals that are able to solve problems and imitate the behavior of others are therefore able to transmit information across generations.

A relevant social skill governed via social norms is the interpretation of communication systems, which opens a door to understanding socially relevant beliefs, practices, and ways of thinking. Communication has played a key role in cultural learning since birth, beginning with imitative learning and interpreting emotions. Humans also tend to follow "communicative" ways of learning, as seen in a study by Hanna Marno, a researcher at the International School for Advanced Studies, which showed that infants followed an adult's action of pressing a button to light up a lamp based on the adult's "non-verbal (eye contact) and verbal cues." In an environment with a large amount of adaptive knowledge and high transmission fidelity, selective social learning takes place; individuals with better social learning abilities (e.g. interpretation of communication systems) grasp the adaptive knowledge produced especially by larger groups.

A modern approach to cultural transmission would be that of the internet. One example would be millennials, which "are both products of their culture as well as influencers." Millennials are often the ones teaching older generations how to navigate the web. The teacher has to accommodate the learning process of the student, in this case an older generation student, in order to transmit the information fluently and in a manner that is easier to understand. This goes in hand with the Communication Accommodation Theory, which "elaborates the human tendency to adjust their behavior while interacting." The end result would be that with the help of someone else, people are able to share their newly acquired skills among people in their culture which was not possible before. “Bottom line: if you want to have cool technology, it’s better to be social than smart.”

Examples
An example of cultural transmission can be seen in post-World War II Japan during the American occupation of Japan. There were political, economic, and social changes in Japan influenced by America. Some changes were to their constitution, reforms, and consumption of media which was influenced by American occupiers. The occupation of Japan transformed into a strong link between nations. Over time, Japanese culture began to accept American touchstones like jazz and baseball, while Americans were introduced to Japanese cuisine and entertainment.

In non-human animals
Enculturation can also be used to describe the raising of an animal in which the animal acquires traits and skills that would not otherwise be acquired through raising by another of their species (van Schaik and Judith M. Burkart, 2011). Cultural learning is dependent on innovation or the ability to create new responses to the environment and the ability to communicate or imitate the behavior of others (Lehmann, Feldman & Kaeuffer, 2010). Animals that are able to solve problems and imitate the behavior of others are therefore able to transmit information across generations. A wide variety of social animals learn from other members of their group or pack. Wolves, for example, learn multiple hunting strategies from the other pack members. A large number of bird species also engage in cultural learning; such learning is critical for the survival of some species. Dolphins also pass on knowledge about tool use.

Content-based
These biases explain ‘what’ is learned; people learn from behaviors by directly assessing the value of the trait and its impact on the population. For example, people learn and replicate the behavior of strong emotional reactions or survival mechanisms, (e.g. escaping a crime scene or seeing a spider on the wall). . Content biases show just how much humans prefer the social (e.g. relationships), compared to the physical (e.g. weather), and that people tend to culturally learn via these biases if the payoff, i.e. the solution, is socially impactful.

Frequency-based
Frequency-based biases, also known as ‘conformist transmission’, occur when the most common knowledge is culturally adopted, allowing everyone to benefit from the collective intelligence of others. Since there are controversies among when and where these biases are seen, the question raised is whether the behavior seen most, or the behavior of the majority must be learned ? Research has shown that children imitate behaviour when multiple people perform it, compared to one person performing it. It can be said that humans are selective in culturally gaining information and information disproportionately spreads, because of such biases.

Model-based
Bandura was the first to come up with learning through observing, where humans copy each other without truly understanding the behavior. This is because, we, as humans, feel the need to belong and create a stable environment, so we learn from each other. These biases look at aspects of a person that draw the most attention, such as skill or success, which people wish to directly follow. Individuals, therefore, attend to the most ‘prestigious’ models that assert the most social dominance for the acquisition of skills. For example, children prefer to learn from older people compared to same-age friends, despite their friends having more knowledge of certain tasks. The authority of the adult draws children’s attention as they adopt information they assume to be culturally relevant and worthwhile.

Cultural Brain Hypothesis (CBH)
Muthukrishna and his colleagues proposed the cultural brain hypothesis, suggesting that the brains have been selected for their ability to culturally acquire adaptive knowledge. This approach stemmed from the Social Brain Hypothesis, which simply suggests that brains have evolved to solve daily life problems as a society. . The cultural brain hypothesis takes a different route by focusing on a "shift from 'social to learning'". This hypothesis explains that once people evolve in culturally learning from each other, a ‘collective brain’ is developed, which is necessary for not only the general 'know-how', but also newer and newer inventions. This hypothesis explains parameters that cultural learning depend on:


 * 1) Brain size
 * 2) Group size
 * 3) Adaptive Knowledge
 * 4) Length of adolescence

Since members of society are constantly exchanging information and tools, researchers have found a correlation between brain size and social group complexity. For this reason, there is evidence of this correlation in primates who sustain in highly cultural environments, such as humans, but no evidence of such correlation in highly independent primates, such as carnivores, because they are not involved in cultural learning. Social learners thrive in environments with abundant knowledge and intelligent ancestors.

When the above conditions are met, adaptive knowledge will be accumulated via cultural learning over generations. Bigger brains will be selected for and the capacity to culturally learn will improve as people will become better at storing and managing knowledge. Alongside, bigger brains allow for novel behaviors (innovations) to occur over a shorter period of time when culturally learnt knowledge is used to innovate, whereas the same would take thousands of years if individual knowledge was used. Adolescence is a predictor in this theory because it provides time for cultural learning; a period where mandatory schooling, reproduction/fertility, and adopting norms increases the transmission of knowledge. Having grown up with knowledge surrounding us, we begin to prefer cultural learning over individual learning because it increases cognitive complexity. In relation to cultural evolution, increasing cognitive complexity is followed by a larger skill set in society, increasing societal fitness, commonly known as survival of the fittest.

CBH has been tested by observational counts of cultural learning events, and modeling population growth and carrying capacity against culture to examine the wide range of parameters. There is ample empirical evidence on the parameters of CBH, including the relationship between brain size and group size seen in not just humans, but non-human primates as well (e.g. dolphins). A recent study depicted a relationship between brain size with social structure and group size, suggesting that marine social cognition may have evolved to culturally learn, just like humans. Due to this biological/neurological evidence, this hypothesis is predictive of pro-social behavior in primates and explains how big brains are a result of cultural learning. Another piece of evolutionary evidence for the CBH is the transmission of Oldowan stone tool-making practice, which promotes the cultural spread of teaching and language. Researchers at the University of Texas showcased that teaching and language improved stone-making skills, rather than simply imitating, and the transmission of skills among the participants was much quicker as well.

Despite there being ample evidence to support CBH, it is definitely not possible to experiment the evolution of cultural learning, because of the unrealistic time period. Yet, studies conducted over short periods of time are able to demonstrate effectiveness of cultural learning and rate of transmission of cultural skills, supporting the CBH. Critically, comparison to low cultural learning environments is also necessary, but difficult due to lack of data; only statistically significant relationships are published and there are more highly cultured societies than not, reducing the scope of research into a variety of social environments.

Recently, genome sequencing of humans and chimpanzees has provided grounds to identify genetic distinctiveness. To further the CBH, phenotype level comparisons of human and chimpanzee cognition are required to map phenotypic and genotypic evolution of skills that lead to cultural learning. This would provide exploration into adaptive dynamics of cultural learning. The cultural brain hypothesis is, nevertheless, a more developed theory that characterizes the success of our species, accounting for all empirical relationships that make us the most intelligent species on the planet.