The study of language evolution has focused both on the biological evolution of linguistic abilities of humans and the cultural evolution of language, which could have coevolved with each other. Such interactions between different levels of evolutionary systems are also occurring in modern societies, that is, the coevolution of communication platforms and communicative interactions on those platforms.
In particular, online communication platforms recently have become popular due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While such techniques have reduced spatial constraints in our communication, we need to interact with people, avatars, and agents in different situations on various online platforms (e.g., Zoom, SpatialChat, Spatial, clubhouse, VRChat), which are different from face-to-face communication. Meanwhile, this allows us to adapt to or coevolve with such recently emerging communication systems.
How can we take advantage of this opportunity to facilitate co-creative communication for novel value creation? We believe that a constructive approach to the origin and evolution of language can contribute to designing novel forms of interactions for co-creative communication. The constructive approach has developed various ways to create artificial and communicative contexts (e.g., game-theoretical experiments, human-robot interactions, cultural transmission experiments, experimental semiotic approaches, artificial agents, cognitive architectures, network modelings, artificial life) to consider possible scenarios of language and cultural evolution. At the same time, such artificially created situations are getting to reflect real social interactions, according to the recent technological development of communications, including human-robot systems, SNS, AR, VR, and the metaverse. In other words, we are at the origin of the evolution of novel communication in the ongoing and post-COVID-19 pandemic.
This workshop will mainly, but not exclusively, discuss how constructive approaches, related to language and cultural evolution, can contribute to co-creative communication, including related interdisciplinary studies such as empirical methods (psychological experiments, observations, and surveys), and philosophical considerations, including aesthetics and ethics.
We invite researchers in the related field for invited talks and call for presentation in a poster session (hybrid).
This workshop will be held following the successes of “EVOSLACE: Workshop on the emergence and evolution of social learning, communication, language and culture in natural and artificial agents”, held as a workshop in ALIFE2018 in Tokyo (2018), and “Constructive Approaches to Language Evolution”, held as a workshop in Evolang 9 in Kyoto (2012).