Emergent social transmission of model-based representations without inference

ArXi:2604.05777v1 Announce Type: new How do people acquire rich, flexible knowledge about their environment from others despite limited cognitive capacity? Humans are often thought to rely on computationally costly mentalizing, such as inferring others' beliefs. In contrast, cultural evolution emphasizes that behavioral transmission can be ed by simple social cues. Using reinforcement learning simulations, we show how minimal social learning can indirectly transmit higher-level representations.