The aim of this thesis is to examine the cognitive processes of social learning from the bottom up. In the field of comparative psychology, an overemphasis on understanding complex cognitive processes in nonhuman animals (e.g. empathy, imitation), may be detrimental to the study of simpler mechanisms. In this thesis, I report five studies of simple cognitive processes related to social learning. A series of experiments with human children and capuchin monkeys (Sapajus sp.), examined action imitation and identified a possible role for associative learning in the development of this ability. An analysis of observational data from captive capuchins explored a number of lesser-studied social learning phenomena, including behavioural synchrony, the neighbour effect, and group-size effects. The results of this study emphasise the importance of exploring behaviour at a number of levels to appreciate the dynamic nature of social influence. Two final experiments examined social contagion in capuchin monkeys, and highlight the importance of describing the relationship between behaviour and emotion to properly understand more complex social cognition. Together, these studies demonstrate how approaching human and nonhuman behaviour from the bottom up, as well as from the top down, can contribute to a better comparative science of social learning.

Culture involves the handing down of information, traditions, knowledge and skill, views and ideals from one individual to another and across generations by means of social transmission expressed in manufactured objects and behaviour. The evolution of cumulative culture, a human specific capacity, makes possible an inheritance system that is governed by the same Darwinian principles as biological evolution. Cumulative culture has made possible the build-up or ratcheting effect of knowledge and traditions that when put together allow for advanced technology, medicine, education and other highly advanced cognitive processes that characterise humans from non human animals. This dissertation dedicates the first chapter to review the literature pertaining to this topic; describing various types of social learning processes and methodological approaches that are used to query and broadly describe the process of culture in various animals. The following two chapters (2 and 3) present three experiments that provide methodical and systematic exploration of the social transmission process which occurs in chimpanzees; using 3 artificial foraging devices, the 3 studies systematically demonstrate that chimpanzees have the capacity to transmit culture from one individual to another and serially across neighbouring communities- providing laboratory evidence of behavioural variation analogous to that observed in the wild. Chapter 4 then goes on to describe an experiment that tests a number of hypothesised biases in cultural transmission. Looking specifically at social dynamics at play during the transmission of skill within ape groups - I systematically analyse the effects of directed social learning; focusing on kin and status based strategies that are characteristic of group living apes. Chapter 5 is an original, empirical and methodically comparative analysis of hierarchically organized behaviour in human children and chimpanzees using a hierarchically organized artificial fruit. The final chapter (6) discusses the findings of each of the five experiments and compares the results to findings at other captive and wild research sites. I then broaden the topic to explore how the findings relate to broad issues in literature and provide a framework for future research and for understanding the complex mechanisms of intelligent systems.

This work takes up urban historian Lewis Mumford's concern for the phenomena of planned and imposed ordering of human life and societies. Mumford (and others) suggests the problem consists in the use of external plans, technologies (and media) to manipulate, dominate, and even coerce forms of life. It is seen at its worst in war, and even forced systems like Nazism and Stalinism. But these phenomena also take more attractive and seemingly enriching forms. We will focus (along with Daniel Boorstin and Umberto Eco in their own way) on forms which have massively developed in 20th and 21st century society: market and consumer saturation, shaped by dominating mass electronic media. This situation is developed imaginatively, and inventively, yet problematically, in Jean Baudrillard's theory of Hyperreality –a critique of the Western hyper-consumer and media saturated world. But his methods and pictures are not followed here. We take up a very different approach and diagnosis; This approach has become increasingly multidisciplinary: phenomenological, praxeological, anthropological, and philological. We build it up in a reading of human lifeworlds in philosophers Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and anthropologist Tim Ingold. This work does not go in for a picture of language (and cinema) as a system of signification, but as Ludwig Wittgenstein describes it, as tools always already involved in forms of life. We also offer a unique characterization of corporeal imagining and the imaginative creation of lifeworlds, paving the way for what is described as philological resistance: this resistance is seen in the development of a certain praxeological philology and fully realized in the 20th century author J. R. R. Tolkien's mythopoeic concerns. We focus particularly on what we call the double- transfer: the cyclic structure between human artistry and life-world building, each shaped by the other. We endeavor, along with Mumford and others, to counter colonization and find various less manipulated and un-coerced forms of life, and their informal organizing structures. We examine in detail Tolkien's literary and philological project; and the 20th and 21st century's first art form –cinema. Through the philosophical exploration of cinematic craft in Gilles Deleuze, and in the craft of Terrence Malick we see, and are taken up in, the inextricable relationship between how we make, what we make and how we live everyday life.