Maria Pykälä, PhD
Post-doctoral researcher, Division of Psychology, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm
I use experiments to study human social learning and innovation, and agent-based simulations to understand emergent population-level dynamics.
I did my PhD at the Department of Organizational Behaviour at HEC Lausanne in Switzerland with Professor Charles Efferson. I am currently a post-doctoral researcher on human-AI cultural evolution at the Lindström Lab at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, working with Björn Lindström (KI) and Anil Yaman (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam).
Broadly speaking, I am interested in the following questions:
What are the social and cognitive processes that enabled our species to innovate and accumulate culture? What will these mechanisms look like in the future when we increasingly interact with AI?
Research:
- Pykälä, M., Dillion, D., & Galesic, M. (2026). Heterogeneous learning strategies interact with social network structure and problem complexity to benefit collective search. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 381(1948), 20240450. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2024.0450
- Pykälä, M. & Efferson, C. Social learning in social networks. Working Paper.
- Pykälä, M. Algorithm-augmented Collective Innovation. Working paper.
- Schakowski, A., Deffner, D., Kortet, R., Niemelä, P. T., Kavelaars, M. M., Monk, C. T., Pykälä, M., & Kurvers, R. H. J. M. (2026). High-precision tracking of human foragers reveals adaptive social information use in the wild. Science, 391(6784), eady1055. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ady1055
Please reach out at:
maria.pykala @ ki.se
