# Environmental variability shapes the representational format of cultural learning

## TL;DR

This study shows how cultural learning shifts between teaching procedures and goals depending on environmental stability.

## Contribution

The paper introduces an empirical framework showing how environmental variability influences cultural learning formats.

## Key findings

- Microcultures prioritize teaching procedures in stable environments.
- Variable environments encourage sharing of goals and causal reasoning.
- Cultural learning adapts to environmental changes through these shifts.

## Abstract

Cumulative culture requires learning mechanisms that are both efficient and flexible in the face of environmental change. We examine models of this learning mechanism that emphasize teaching what to do (causally opaque procedures) and those that foreground what to aim for and why (goals and causal reasoning). Learning procedures is cheap but inflexible; learning goals is more flexible to changing circumstance, but requires expensive individual learning about how to achieve them. In an iterated learning experiment, we demonstrate that cultural learning adapts in precisely this way: Microcultures more often instruct future generations to follow procedures when the world is stable, but they tend to share information about valuable outcomes and causal relations when the world is variable.