Mushrooms are at the center of my research. I study how knowledge about them is learned and passed on. I run experiments in different countries where participants transmit mushroom information across "generations". These experiments reveal what people remember, what they forget, and how information changes over time. I focus on the cognitive and cultural forces that drive these changes, such as caution and social context. Mushrooms are ideal for this work because they are risky, ambiguous, and culturally diverse. By following how mushroom knowledge evolves, I aim to understand the mechanisms that shape cultural evolution in high-risk domains. Through this work, I aim to establish a novel empirical framework for understanding how cultural and cognitive processes interact to produce adaptive knowledge systems.

I actively promote open science by sharing preregistrations, datasets, and analysis scripts on OSF and Zenodo to ensure transparency and reproducibility. I also design and lead cross-disciplinary symposia at CogSci 2023 (award-winning symposium) and 2024, which brought together researchers from cognitive science, biology, ethnomycology, primatology, and cultural evolution to foster dialogue and collaboration.

Every semester, I deliver one lecture to Master’s students interested in cultural evolution. The session introduces key theories through different schools of thought. It explains the core mechanisms behind cultural transmission, such as operating biases. It also provides practical guidance on how to design experiments to study these processes.

Papa, A. (2025). Cultural Transmission and Evolution of Mushroom Knowledge: Insights From Mycophobic Norway. Topics in Cognitive Science, tops.70027. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70027

Papa, A., Bender, A., Colombo, M., Sawada, A., Abel, R., & Kaaronen, R. (2024). From Fungi to Thought: Exploring Cognition in Mushroom Foraging. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 46.

Papa, A., Bender, A., Sawada, A., Kaaronen, R., & Parise, A. G. (2023). Mushrooms as ‘food for thought’: Cognitive science perspectives on fungi. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 45(45).

Papa, A., Cristea, M., McGuigan, N., & Tamariz, M. (2021). Effects of verbal instruction vs. Modelling on imitation and overimitation. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00925-4

Papa, A., Cristea, M., McGuigan, N., & Tamariz, M. (2022). Understanding Cultural Information Flow: A Qualitative study of a small social group. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/q76xt

Straffon, L. M., Papa, A., Øhrn, H., & Bender, A. (2023). The different paths to cultural convergence. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 46, e253. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X23000560

Tamariz, M., & Papa, A. (2025). Iterated learning experiments. In L. Raviv & C. Boeckx (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Approaches to Language Evolution (1st ed., pp. 3–24). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780192886491.013.2

Tamariz, M., Papa, A., Cristea, M., & McGuigan, N. (2023). Context congruence: How associative learning modulates cultural evolution. Plos One, 18(4), e0282776.