Cognition materializes in an interpersonal space. The emergence of complex behaviors
requires the coordination of actions among individuals according to a shared set of rules …

Drawing is a cognitive tool that makes the invisible contents of mental life visible. Humans
use this tool to produce a remarkable variety of pictures, from realistic portraits to schematic …

Abstract Language exhibits striking systematic structure. Words are composed of
combinations of reusable sounds, and those words in turn are combined to form complex …

Language is an essential part of what makes us human. Where did it come from? How did it
develop into the complex system we know today? And what can an evolutionary perspective …

There exists an undeniable chasm between the capacities of humans and those of animals.
Our minds have spawned civilizations and technologies that have changed the face of the …

Abstract Zipf's Law of Abbreviation–the idea that more frequent symbols in a code are
simpler than less frequent ones–has been shown to hold at the level of words in many …

Iconicity, a resemblance between properties of linguistic form (both in spoken and signed
languages) and meaning, has traditionally been considered to be a marginal, irrelevant …

Iterated learning describes the process whereby an individual learns their behaviour by
exposure to another individual's behaviour, who themselves learnt it in the same way. It can …

We introduce an experimental paradigm for studying the cumulative cultural evolution of
language. In doing so we provide the first experimental validation for the idea that cultural …

For over a century, psychology has focused on uncovering mental processes of a single
individual. However, humans rarely navigate the world in isolation. The most important …