{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/network-connectivity-dynamics-affect-the","title":"Network connectivity dynamics affect the evolution of culturally transmitted variants","arxiv_id":"1902.06598","date":"2019-02-09","proceeding":null,"authors":["José Segovia Martín","Bradley Walker","Nicolas Fay","Monica Tamariz"],"abstract":"The distribution of cultural variants in a population is shaped by both\nneutral evolutionary dynamics and by selection pressures, which include several\nindividual cognitive biases, demographic factors and social network structures.\nThe temporal dynamics of social network connectivity, i.e. the order in which\nindividuals in a population interact with each other, has been largely\nunexplored. In this paper we investigate how, in a fully connected social\nnetwork, connectivity dynamics, alone and in interaction with different\ncognitive biases, affect the evolution of cultural variants. Using agent-based\ncomputer simulations, we manipulate population connectivity dynamics (early,\nmiddle and late full-population connectivity); content bias, or a preference\nfor high-quality variants; coordination bias, or whether agents tend to use\nself-produced variants (egocentric bias), or to switch to variants observed in\nothers (allocentric bias); and memory size, or the number of items that agents\ncan store in their memory. We show that connectivity dynamics affect the\ntime-course of variant spread, with lower connectivity slowing down convergence\nof the population onto a single cultural variant. We also show that, compared\nto a neutral evolutionary model, content bias accelerates convergence and\namplifies the effects of connectivity dynamics, whilst larger memory size and\ncoordination bias, especially egocentric bias, slow down convergence.\nFurthermore, connectivity dynamics affect the frequency of high quality\nvariants (adaptiveness), with late connectivity populations showing bursts of\nrapid change in adaptiveness followed by periods of relatively slower change,\nand early connectivity populations following a single-peak evolutionary\ndynamic. In this way, we provide for the first time a direct connection between\nthe order of agents' interactions and punctuational evolution.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1902.06598v1","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.06598v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"network-connectivity-dynamics-affect-the","repo_url":"https://github.com/jsegoviamartin/network_connectivity_dynamics_model","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}