Dr. Maria Pykälä
Postdoctoral researcher, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, 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. Working Paper.
- Schakowski, A., Deffner, D., Kortet, R., Niemelä, P. T., Kavelaars, M. M., Monk, C. T., Pykälä, M., & Kurvers, R. High-precision tracking of human foragers reveals adaptive social information use in the wild (2026).
- Pykälä, M., Galesic, M, & Dillion, D. (in press). Heterogeneous learning strategies interact with social network structure and problem complexity to benefit collective search. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B. doi10.1098/rstb.2024-0450.
- Pykälä, M. (2025). Algorithm-augmented Collective Innovation. Under peer-review at Nature Human Behavior.
For speaking engagements please reach out via email:
maria.pykala @ ki.se
Maria Pykälä 