Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

One of the major ways that people engage in adaptive problemsolving is by copying the solutions of others. Most of the workon this field has focused on three questions: when to copy, whoto copy from, and what to copy. However, how much to copyhas been relatively less explored. In the current research, weare interested in the consequences for a group when its mem-bers engage in social learning strategies with different tenden-cies to copy entire or partial solutions and different complex-ities of search problems. We also consider different networktopologies that affect the solutions visible to each member.Using a computational model of collective problem solving,we demonstrate that strategies where social learning involvespartial copying outperform strategies where individuals copyentire solutions. We analyze the exploration/exploitation dy-namics of these social learning strategies under the differentconditions.