Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: Interactivity in the form of free-flowing, interactive conversation purportedly drives the transmission of cultural information in small groups and large networks. In formal (e.g. schools) and informal (e.g. home) learning settings interactivity does not only allow individuals and groups to faithfully transmit and learn new knowledge and skills but also to boost cumulative cultural evolution. However, experimental research has often demonstrated that emulation (i.e. reverse engineering) and imitation led to learning outcomes comparable to those of teaching. Here we investigate how interactivity affects performance, teaching, learning, innovation and chosen diffusion mode (e.g. instructional discourse vs. storytelling) of previously acquired information in a transmission chain experiment where participants (n=288) working in 48 chains with three generations of pairs had to learn and complete a collaborative food preparation task (ravioli-making), and then transmit their experience to a new generation of participants in an interactive and non-interactive condition. Food preparation is a real-world task that it is taught and learned across cultures and transmitted over generations in families and groups. The number of good exemplars of ravioli each pair produced was taken as measurement of performance. The main results showed that (1) higher performance generations introduced more innovations in transmission sesssions; (2) learners applied those transmitted innovations to their performance and made them persist over generations; (3) storytelling was specialized for the transmission of non-routine, unexpected information; but (4) there was no evidence that interactivity promoted storytelling in transmission sessions, that (5) performance increased over generations or (6) due to interactivity. Our findings offer new insights on how interactivity affects the cultural transmission of complex collaborative tasks.