سفر ذهنی در زمان، حافظه و مسابقات راهبردهای یادگیری اجتماعی

The social learning strategies tournament was an open computer-based tournament investigating the best way to learn in a changing environment. Here we present an analysis of the impact of memory on the ability of strategies entered into the social learning strategies tournament (Rendell, Boyd, et al., 2010) to modify their own behavior to suit a changing environment. The tournament showed that a strategy's ability to remember the past and to predict the future were both key to its success. The possibility that a strategy needs to engage in an approximation of ‘mental time travel’ to succeed in the tournament strongly implies that investment in randomly timed social learning is not enough to guarantee success. A strategy must use social learning strategically with reference to both predicted future environmental states and past environmental states. We examine the two most successful strategies (DiscountMachine and Intergeneration) in terms of their use of memory and discuss the impact of their complex memory use on their ability to time learning moves strategically and track environmental change. The tournament suggests that the human capacity for mental time travel may have improved the efficiency of social learning and allowed humans to invest in more sophisticated social learning than is seen elsewhere in the animal kingdom.

Learning and memory are two clearly related concepts, with the ability to learn resting on the ability to form memories. Learning is generally defined as an extended and long-term process whereby individuals can alter their behavior and state of knowledge, based, in part, on their previous experiences. As the neural substrate for learning, memory can be considered to be a description of how changes in knowledge state, motor abilities or behavioral repertoire are encoded in the brain and later retrieved to form the basis of behavioral changes (Richter, 1966). It is therefore not a huge leap in imagination to glean information about memory use from models of learning. Here we do that, paying special attention to the role of memory in the learning exhibited in the social learning strategies tournament (Rendell et al., 2010a and Rendell et al., 2011).