• HOME
  • NEWS
    • BIOENGINEERING
    • SCIENCE NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • FORUM
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
Saturday, February 27, 2021
BIOENGINEER.ORG
No Result
View All Result
  • Login
  • HOME
  • NEWS
    • BIOENGINEERING
    • SCIENCE NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • FORUM
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
  • HOME
  • NEWS
    • BIOENGINEERING
    • SCIENCE NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • FORUM
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
No Result
View All Result
Bioengineer.org
No Result
View All Result
Home NEWS Science News Biology

The rhythm of change: What a drum-beat experiment reveals about cultural evolution

Bioengineer by Bioengineer
October 28, 2020
in Biology
0
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on LinkedinShare on RedditShare on Telegram

IMAGE

Credit: Daniel Vegel

Living organisms aren’t the only things that evolve over time. Cultural practices change, too, and in recent years social scientists have taken a keen interest in understanding this cultural evolution. Much research has focused on psychological factors among individuals, like how our visual system constrains the shape of written characters.

But environmental factors like availability of materials or physical space likely play a role, too, says Helena Miton, a Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. Although researchers in the field generally acknowledge the influence of the environment on cultural shifts, she says, the effects have never been investigated experimentally.

To tease out those influences, Miton recently designed a series of experiments — using three identical drums and over 100 participants — to investigate the influence of material constraints on the development of culture. She and her collaborators described the experiment and their results in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the Royal Society’s primary biology journal.

The group focused in particular on how environmental factors influence the evolution of rhythm. Miton says she chose to study music because instruments clearly depend on material constraints. The materials available to a community, for example, will determine the kinds of instruments they can create, which in turn shape the acoustics and sounds.

“We wanted to have an experiment that was as simple as possible,” says Miton. The researchers recruited 120 participants, none of whom had ever studied music, to participate in an experiment modeled on the game “Telephone.” Such so-called transmission chains, says Miton, are often used in laboratory settings to mimic cultural communications.

Participants were divided into chains of six people each. The first person listened to a simple sequence of beats played on three drums, and then attempted to replicate the rhythm. The second person listened to the first person’s attempt and tried to replicate it, and so on. Miton and her collaborators studied how the rhythms changed through the transmission.

In some chains, people were given a rhythm to play on drums sitting next to each other. Others had to try to recreate beats on drums separated by larger distances. And still others faced a mix of small and large distances between the drums they were using. In total, the researchers studied four different spatial configurations of drums and compared how the rhythms produced by participants diverged across those configurations.

“People transform what they heard in a very systematic, rather than random, way,” says cognitive scientist Dan Sperber at Central European University, in Budapest, who worked with Miton on the project. “We can predict how the rhythms will change.” The scientists hypothesized, correctly, that over time the rhythms would diverge significantly from the original seed rhythm, and in a specific way for each configuration.

“This was a proof of concept experiment to show that with different environments, different cultural patterns would emerge,” says Miton. “What’s important is that we showed that you can parse out ecological and psychological factors.”

She says she hopes this simple drum-and-telephone experiment will inspire new ways to tease out the many influences on cultural evolution in the future.

###

Media Contact
J Marshall
[email protected]

Related Journal Article

http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2020.2001

Tags: AnthropologyArts/CultureBehaviorBiologyMemory/Cognitive ProcessesSocial/Behavioral Science
Share12Tweet8Share2ShareShareShare2

Related Posts

IMAGE

Predicts the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) using deep learning-based Splice-AI

February 27, 2021
IMAGE

Cerium sidelines silver to make drug precursor

February 26, 2021

Agents of food-borne zoonoses confirmed to parasitise newly-recorded in Thailand snails

February 26, 2021

Dinosaur species: ‘Everyone’s unique’

February 26, 2021

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

POPULAR NEWS

  • IMAGE

    Terahertz accelerates beyond 5G towards 6G

    638 shares
    Share 255 Tweet 160
  • People living with HIV face premature heart disease and barriers to care

    82 shares
    Share 33 Tweet 21
  • Global analysis suggests COVID-19 is seasonal

    38 shares
    Share 15 Tweet 10
  • HIV: an innovative therapeutic breakthrough to optimize the immune system

    35 shares
    Share 14 Tweet 9

About

We bring you the latest biotechnology news from best research centers and universities around the world. Check our website.

Follow us

Tags

Technology/Engineering/Computer ScienceMedicine/HealthcancerInfectious/Emerging DiseasesEcology/EnvironmentMaterialsCell BiologyClimate ChangeBiologyGeneticsPublic HealthChemistry/Physics/Materials Sciences

Recent Posts

  • Predicts the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) using deep learning-based Splice-AI
  • When foams collapse (and when they don’t)
  • UTA researcher explores effects of trauma at the cellular, tissue levels of the brain
  • Picture books can boost physical activity for youth with autism
  • Contact Us

© 2019 Bioengineer.org - Biotechnology news by Science Magazine - Scienmag.

No Result
View All Result
  • Homepages
    • Home Page 1
    • Home Page 2
  • News
  • National
  • Business
  • Health
  • Lifestyle
  • Science

© 2019 Bioengineer.org - Biotechnology news by Science Magazine - Scienmag.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Create New Account!

Fill the forms below to register

All fields are required. Log In

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In