Helena Miton
Biographic Data
| ID | 114612 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Helena Miton |
| GIVEN NAMES | Helena |
| FAMILY NAME | Miton |
| SIGNATURE | MITON H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Santa Fe Institute |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0896-1167 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 19 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 14 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Cognitive affordances of South Scandinavian Mesolithic portable art as inferred from complexity and entropy measures
Unravelling the complex dynamics of past symbolic behaviour is challenging using traditional archaeological approaches alone. Drawing on the cognitive sciences, we here present novel computational measures of the portable art of Mesolithic South Scandinavia. The anthropogenic ornamentation on archaeological artefacts is quantified by calculating Shannon information entropy and perimetric complexity. These two methods in combination – measuring ea…
The Polaris2025 Seshat Data Release
This report describes the current canonical dataset named Polaris2025, a subset of Seshat: Global History Databank data. This dataset focuses on a well curated list of polities and variables that have been already used in publications or will be used in forthcoming ones. The report provides an introduction to the methods and procedures of the Seshat project relating to the curation and release of the Polaris2025 dataset. The Polaris2025 dataset b…
The phonology of letter shapes
The visual shapes of letters, contrary to the phonemes of spoken languages, lack a unified description. • With a gamified approach, we crowdsourced thousands of letter descriptions. • 43 scripts’ letters can be completely described as sets of binary features. • Compared to phonemes, letters require more such features for a complete description. • These features are also less informative in letters than in phonemes. Differentiating letter shapes a…
Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation holds for individual characters across a broad range of writing systems
Zipf's Law of Abbreviation - the idea that more frequent symbols in a code are simpler than less frequent ones - has been shown to hold at the level of words in many languages. We tested whether it holds at the level of individual written characters. Character complexity is similar to word length in that it requires more cognitive and motor effort for producing and processing more complex symbols. We built a dataset of character complexity and fr…
Statistical signals of copying are robust to time- and space-averaging
Cattle brands (ownership marks left on animals) are subject to forces influencing other graphic codes: the copying of constituent parts, pressure for distinctiveness and pressure for complexity. The historical record of cattle brands in some US states is complete owing to legal registration, providing a unique opportunity to assess how sampling processes leading to time- and space-averaging influence our ability to make inferences from limited da…
Signals of copying in the cultural evolution of cattle brands are robust to time- and space-averaging
Cattle brands (ownership marks left on animals) are subject to forces influencing other graphic codes: the copying of constituent parts, pressure for distinctiveness, and pressure for complexity. The historical record of cattle brands in some US states is complete due to legal registration, providing a unique opportunity to assess how sampling processes leading to time- and space-averaging influence our ability to make inferences from limited dat…
Graphic complexity in writing systems
A writing system is a graphic code, i.e., a system of standardized pairings between symbols and meanings in which symbols take the form of images that can endure. The visual character of writing implies that written characters have to fit constraints of the human visual system. One aspect of this optimization lays in the graphic complexity of the characters used by scripts. Scripts are sets of graphic characters used for the written form of one l…
Understanding early horse transport in eastern Eurasia through analysis of equine dentition
Across Eurasia, horse transport transformed ancient societies. Although evidence for chariotry is well dated, the origins of horse riding are less clear. Techniques to distinguish chariotry from riding in archaeological samples rely on elements not typically recovered from many steppe contexts. Here, the authors examine horse remains of Mongolia's Deer Stone-Khirigsuur (DSK) Complex, comparing them with ancient and modern East Asian horses used f…
Culture without copying or selection
Typical examples of cultural phenomena all exhibit a degree of similarity across time and space at the level of the population. As such, a fundamental question for any science of culture is, what ensures this stability in the first place? Here we focus on the evolutionary and stabilising role of ‘convergent transformation’, in which one item causes the production of another item whose form tends to deviate from the original in a directed, non-ran…
The Predictable Evolution of Letter Shapes
A familiar story about the evolution of alphabets is that individual letters originated in iconic representations of real things. Over time, these naturalistic pictures became simplified into abstract forms. Thus, the iconic ox's head 𓃾 of Egyptian hieroglyphics transformed into the Phoenician 𐤀 and eventually the Roman letter A. In this vein, attempts to theorize the evolution of writing have tended to propose variations on a model of unilinea…
Utilizing simple cues to informational dependency
Detecting wholesale copying in cultural evolution
Individual Choose-to-Transmit Decisions Reveal Little Preference for Transmitting Negative or High-Arousal Content
Research on social transmission suggests that people preferentially transmit information about threats and social interactions. Such biases might be driven by the arousal that is experienced as part of the emotional response triggered by information about threats or social relationships. The current studies tested whether preferences for transmitting threat-relevant information are consistent with a functional motive to recruit social support. US…
Universal cognitive mechanisms explain the cultural success of bloodletting
Understanding early horse transport in eastern Eurasia through analysis of equine dentition
Across Eurasia, horse transport transformed ancient societies. Although evidence for chariotry is well dated, the origins of horse riding are less clear. Techniques to distinguish chariotry from riding in archaeological samples rely on elements not typically recovered from many steppe contexts. Here, the authors examine horse remains of Mongolia's Deer Stone-Khirigsuur (DSK) Complex, comparing them with ancient and modern East Asian horses used f…
The Predictable Evolution of Letter Shapes
A familiar story about the evolution of alphabets is that individual letters originated in iconic representations of real things. Over time, these naturalistic pictures became simplified into abstract forms. Thus, the iconic ox's head 𓃾 of Egyptian hieroglyphics transformed into the Phoenician 𐤀 and eventually the Roman letter A. In this vein, attempts to theorize the evolution of writing have tended to propose variations on a model of unilinea…
Culture without copying or selection
Typical examples of cultural phenomena all exhibit a degree of similarity across time and space at the level of the population. As such, a fundamental question for any science of culture is, what ensures this stability in the first place? Here we focus on the evolutionary and stabilising role of ‘convergent transformation’, in which one item causes the production of another item whose form tends to deviate from the original in a directed, non-ran…
Statistical signals of copying are robust to time- and space-averaging
Cattle brands (ownership marks left on animals) are subject to forces influencing other graphic codes: the copying of constituent parts, pressure for distinctiveness and pressure for complexity. The historical record of cattle brands in some US states is complete owing to legal registration, providing a unique opportunity to assess how sampling processes leading to time- and space-averaging influence our ability to make inferences from limited da…
Individual Choose-to-Transmit Decisions Reveal Little Preference for Transmitting Negative or High-Arousal Content
Research on social transmission suggests that people preferentially transmit information about threats and social interactions. Such biases might be driven by the arousal that is experienced as part of the emotional response triggered by information about threats or social relationships. The current studies tested whether preferences for transmitting threat-relevant information are consistent with a functional motive to recruit social support. US…
Universal cognitive mechanisms explain the cultural success of bloodletting
Detecting wholesale copying in cultural evolution
Individual Choose-to-Transmit Decisions Reveal Little Preference for Transmitting Negative or High-Arousal Content
Research on social transmission suggests that people preferentially transmit information about threats and social interactions. Such biases might be driven by the arousal that is experienced as part of the emotional response triggered by information about threats or social relationships. The current studies tested whether preferences for transmitting threat-relevant information are consistent with a functional motive to recruit social support. US…
Utilizing simple cues to informational dependency
Graphic complexity in writing systems
A writing system is a graphic code, i.e., a system of standardized pairings between symbols and meanings in which symbols take the form of images that can endure. The visual character of writing implies that written characters have to fit constraints of the human visual system. One aspect of this optimization lays in the graphic complexity of the characters used by scripts. Scripts are sets of graphic characters used for the written form of one l…
Understanding early horse transport in eastern Eurasia through analysis of equine dentition
Across Eurasia, horse transport transformed ancient societies. Although evidence for chariotry is well dated, the origins of horse riding are less clear. Techniques to distinguish chariotry from riding in archaeological samples rely on elements not typically recovered from many steppe contexts. Here, the authors examine horse remains of Mongolia's Deer Stone-Khirigsuur (DSK) Complex, comparing them with ancient and modern East Asian horses used f…
Culture without copying or selection
Typical examples of cultural phenomena all exhibit a degree of similarity across time and space at the level of the population. As such, a fundamental question for any science of culture is, what ensures this stability in the first place? Here we focus on the evolutionary and stabilising role of ‘convergent transformation’, in which one item causes the production of another item whose form tends to deviate from the original in a directed, non-ran…
The Predictable Evolution of Letter Shapes
A familiar story about the evolution of alphabets is that individual letters originated in iconic representations of real things. Over time, these naturalistic pictures became simplified into abstract forms. Thus, the iconic ox's head 𓃾 of Egyptian hieroglyphics transformed into the Phoenician 𐤀 and eventually the Roman letter A. In this vein, attempts to theorize the evolution of writing have tended to propose variations on a model of unilinea…
Signals of copying in the cultural evolution of cattle brands are robust to time- and space-averaging
Cattle brands (ownership marks left on animals) are subject to forces influencing other graphic codes: the copying of constituent parts, pressure for distinctiveness, and pressure for complexity. The historical record of cattle brands in some US states is complete due to legal registration, providing a unique opportunity to assess how sampling processes leading to time- and space-averaging influence our ability to make inferences from limited dat…
Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation holds for individual characters across a broad range of writing systems
Zipf's Law of Abbreviation - the idea that more frequent symbols in a code are simpler than less frequent ones - has been shown to hold at the level of words in many languages. We tested whether it holds at the level of individual written characters. Character complexity is similar to word length in that it requires more cognitive and motor effort for producing and processing more complex symbols. We built a dataset of character complexity and fr…
Statistical signals of copying are robust to time- and space-averaging
Cattle brands (ownership marks left on animals) are subject to forces influencing other graphic codes: the copying of constituent parts, pressure for distinctiveness and pressure for complexity. The historical record of cattle brands in some US states is complete owing to legal registration, providing a unique opportunity to assess how sampling processes leading to time- and space-averaging influence our ability to make inferences from limited da…
The Polaris2025 Seshat Data Release
This report describes the current canonical dataset named Polaris2025, a subset of Seshat: Global History Databank data. This dataset focuses on a well curated list of polities and variables that have been already used in publications or will be used in forthcoming ones. The report provides an introduction to the methods and procedures of the Seshat project relating to the curation and release of the Polaris2025 dataset. The Polaris2025 dataset b…
The phonology of letter shapes
The visual shapes of letters, contrary to the phonemes of spoken languages, lack a unified description. • With a gamified approach, we crowdsourced thousands of letter descriptions. • 43 scripts’ letters can be completely described as sets of binary features. • Compared to phonemes, letters require more such features for a complete description. • These features are also less informative in letters than in phonemes. Differentiating letter shapes a…
Cognitive affordances of South Scandinavian Mesolithic portable art as inferred from complexity and entropy measures
Unravelling the complex dynamics of past symbolic behaviour is challenging using traditional archaeological approaches alone. Drawing on the cognitive sciences, we here present novel computational measures of the portable art of Mesolithic South Scandinavia. The anthropogenic ornamentation on archaeological artefacts is quantified by calculating Shannon information entropy and perimetric complexity. These two methods in combination – measuring ea…
Psychology (9 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Language and cultural evolution (7 works) · Artificial Intelligence (5 works) · Mathematics (5 works) · Social Psychology (5 works) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (4 works) · Biology (4 works) · Cognition (4 works) · Copying (4 works)