Maria Pykälä

Postdoctoral researcher, Karolinska Institut, Stockholm

I’m a social scientist working on cultural evolution, with a background in evolutionary anthropology and behavioural science.

I use both online and laboratory experiments to study human behaviour. I also use simulations to understand its evolutionary underpinnings and emergent dynamics. My overarching research question is:

”What are the social and cognitive processes that enabled our species to innovate and accumulate culture, and what will these mechanisms look like in the future?”

Questions i’m interested in:

Cultural evolution & human-machine coevolution

How do intelligent agents shape our short-term and long-term cultural evolution? What will gene-culture-machine co-evolution look like?
What are the consequences of vast AI exploration of information landscapes on human cultural evolution?
How can we augment collective innovation with human-AI interaction?

Social transmission shaping cultural evolution and collective intelligence

How do we learn from each other?
How did social learning strategies co-evolve with social networks?
How do the interactions between cognitive processes and social network dynamics shape cultural evolution and collective intelligence?

Projects

Pykälä, M. & Efferson, C. (2025). Social learning in social networks. Under review.
Schakowski, A., Deffner, D., Kortet, R., Niemelä, P. T., Kavelaars, M. M., Monk, C. T., Pykälä, M., & Kurvers, R. (2025). Socioecology drives adaptive social foraging dynamics in the wild. OSF. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/qbvp9_v1
Pykälä, M., Galesic, M, & Dillion, D. (2025). Heterogeneous learning strategies interact with social network structure and problem complexity to benefit collective search. Under review.
Pykälä, M. (2025). Algorithm-augmented cumulative cultural evolution. Working paper.

Reach out via email: maria.pykala @ unil.ch

Bluesky