Intelligence is a population property. Certainly practice (trial-and-error) is fundamental for learning. However, humans learn things from others, improve and transmit them to the next generation, leading to a cultural accumulation that can not be developed by a single individual during her lifetime. Culture is information distributed in individuals that is transmitted through imitation and other forms of social learning. By social learning we refer to long-term changes in behavior caused by stimuli derived from observation or interaction with other individuals. Social and neural systems have similar characteristics of information processing: both are a network of elements; memory and learning are distributed processes; they are robust to death and constant failures of their individuals; intelligence, cognitive or cultural, are emergent properties of the interaction of its elements.
In the lab we study learning at human communities. We search social factors that favor individual learning, and we seek to understand the computational properties of cultural information systems.
