The ontogeny of selective social learning: Young children flexibly adopt majority- or payoff-based biases depending on task uncertainty

2022 ◽  
Vol 214 ◽  
pp. 105307
Author(s):  
Emily R.R. Burdett ◽  
Andrew Whiten ◽  
Nicola McGuigan
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Task Uncertainty

scholarly journals Social learning strategies regulate the wisdom and madness of interactive crowds

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wataru Toyokawa ◽  
Andrew Whalen ◽  
Kevin N. Laland
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Learning Strategies ◽  
Group Size ◽  
Collective Intelligence ◽  
Collective Wisdom ◽  
The Social ◽  
Challenging Tasks ◽  
Task Uncertainty ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Social Learning Strategies

AbstractWhy groups of individuals sometimes exhibit collective ‘wisdom’ and other times maladaptive ‘herding’ is an enduring conundrum. Here we show that this apparent conflict is regulated by the social learning strategies deployed. We examined the patterns of human social learning through an interactive online experiment with 699 participants, varying both task uncertainty and group size, then used hierarchical Bayesian model-ftting to identify the individual learning strategies exhibited by participants. Challenging tasks elicit greater conformity amongst individuals, with rates of copying increasing with group size, leading to high probabilities of herding amongst large groups confronted with uncertainty. Conversely, the reduced social learning of small groups, and the greater probability that social information would be accurate for less-challenging tasks, generated ‘wisdom of the crowd’ effects in other circumstances. Our model-based approach provides evidence that the likelihood of collective intelligence versus herding can be predicted, resolving a longstanding puzzle in the literature.

scholarly journals The scope and limits of overimitation in the transmission of artefact culture

2011 ◽  
Vol 366 (1567) ◽  
pp. 1158-1167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek E. Lyons ◽  
Diana H. Damrosch ◽  
Jennifer K. Lin ◽  
Deanna M. Macris ◽  
Frank C. Keil
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Learning Processes ◽  
Novel Object ◽  
Causal Understanding ◽  
Learning Function ◽  
Intentional Actions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Learning Processes ◽  
Unfamiliar Object

Children are generally masterful imitators, both rational and flexible in their reproduction of others' actions. After observing an adult operating an unfamiliar object, however, young children will frequently overimitate , reproducing not only the actions that were causally necessary but also those that were clearly superfluous. Why does overimitation occur? We argue that when children observe an adult intentionally acting on a novel object, they may automatically encode all of the adult's actions as causally meaningful. This process of automatic causal encoding (ACE) would generally guide children to accurate beliefs about even highly opaque objects. In situations where some of an adult's intentional actions were unnecessary, however, it would also lead to persistent overimitation. Here, we undertake a thorough examination of the ACE hypothesis, reviewing prior evidence and offering three new experiments to further test the theory. We show that children will persist in overimitating even when doing so is costly (underscoring the involuntary nature of the effect), but also that the effect is constrained by intentionality in a manner consistent with its posited learning function. Overimitation may illuminate not only the structure of children's causal understanding, but also the social learning processes that support our species' artefact-centric culture.

Young children use and evaluate others’ arguments when forming and revising beliefs

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadja Miosga ◽  
Thomas Schultze ◽  
hannes rakoczy
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Belief Revision ◽  
The Other ◽  
Perceptual Judgment ◽  
Good Argument ◽  
Perceptual Condition ◽  
Argument Quality ◽  
Selective Learning ◽  
Relative Evaluation

What do young children understand about arguments? In particular, do they evaluate arguments critically when deciding whom to learn from? To address this question, the present study investigated children at age 4 to 5, a period in which capacities for basic selective social learning have been documented. In Studies 1a/b, children were asked to make an initial perceptual judgment regarding the location of an object under varying perceptual circumstances; then received advice by another informant who had either better or worse perceptual access than they themselves; and were then allowed to make their final judgment. The advice given by the other informant was sometimes accompanied by utterances of the form “I am certain … because I have seen it”. These utterances thus constituted good arguments in some conditions, but not in others. Results showed that children engaged in more belief-revision when the informant gave this argument only when her perceptual condition was high, and thus her argument, was good. In Study 2, children were asked to find out about different properties (color vs. texture) of an object, and received conflicting testimony from two informants who supported their claims by utterances of the form “because I have seen it” (good argument regarding color; poor regarding texture) or “because I have felt it” (vice versa). Again, children engaged in context-relative evaluation of argument quality. Taken together, these finding reveal that children from age 4 understand argument quality in sophisticated, context-relative ways, and use this understanding for selective learning and belief-revision.

scholarly journals Retrospective inferences in selective trust

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 191451
Author(s):  
Friederike Schütte ◽  
Nivedita Mani ◽  
Tanya Behne
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Attentional Bias ◽  
Metacognitive Strategies ◽  
Novel Object ◽  
Object Selection ◽  
Conflicting Information ◽  
Preferential Looking ◽  
Selective Trust ◽  
The Future

Young children learn selectively from others based on the speakers' prior accuracy. This indicates that they recognize the models’ (in)competence and use it to predict who will provide the most accurate and useful information in the future. Here, we investigated whether 5-year-old children are also able to use speaker reliability retrospectively, once they have more information regarding their competence. They first experienced two previously unknown speakers who provided conflicting information about the referent of a novel label, with each speaker using the same novel label to refer exclusively to a different novel object. Following this, children learned about the speakers' differing labelling accuracy. Subsequently, children selectively endorsed the object–label link initially provided by the speaker who turned out to be reliable significantly above chance. Crucially, more than half of these children justified their object selection with reference to speaker reliability, indicating the ability to explicitly reason about their selective trust in others based on the informants’ individual competences. Findings further corroborate the notion that young children are able to use advanced, metacognitive strategies (trait reasoning) to learn selectively. By contrast, since learning preceded reliability exposure and gaze data showed no preferential looking toward the more reliable speaker, findings cannot be accounted for by attentional bias accounts of selective social learning.

scholarly journals Emotion as information in early social learning

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yang Wu ◽  
Laura Schulz ◽  
Michael C. Frank ◽  
Hyowon Gweon
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Early Learning ◽  
Emotional Expressions ◽  
Cognitive Sciences ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
Learning From Others ◽  
Information Framework ◽  
Source Of Information

Adults often display a wide range of emotional expressions when they interact with young children. What do these expressions mean, and what role do they play in how children think and learn? While emotional expressions are typically considered to be indicators of how others feel, an emerging body of work suggests that these expressions support rich, powerful inferences about hidden aspects of the world and about the contents of others’ minds. Beyond learning from others’ speech, actions, and demonstrations, here we argue that infants and children harness others’ emotional expressions as a source of information for learning broadly. This “emotion as information” framework integrates affective, developmental, and computational cognitive sciences, extending the scope of signals that count as “information" in early learning.

scholarly journals Cognitive foundations of distinctively human social learning and teaching

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyowon Gweon
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Distinctive Feature ◽  
Developmental Research ◽  
Learning And Teaching ◽  
Abstract Knowledge ◽  
Cognitive Foundations ◽  
Widespread View

A widespread view of social learning is that humans, especially children, learn by copying what others do and trusting what others say. This learner-centric perspective, however, fails to capture a distinctive feature of human social learning: We learn from those who help us learn, and eventually become helpful teachers ourselves. Recent computational and developmental research suggests that young children are not only powerful social learners but also helpful teachers, and their abilities as learners and as teachers have common cognitive roots: Domain-general probabilistic inferences guided by an intuitive understanding of how others think, plan, and act. Rather than studying social learning and teaching as two distinct capacities, inferential social learning paints an integrated picture of how humans acquire and communicate abstract knowledge.

scholarly journals Mobbing - et forsøk på nye teoretiske perspektiv

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 40
Author(s):  
Dag Nome
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Social Behavior ◽  
Social Learning ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The Body ◽  
Life World ◽  
The Social

<p>This article discusses the understanding of bullying and how it first appears as a phenomenon in early childhood. Empirical research on the social life of young children indicates a capacity for empathy that is independent of social learning. Based upon Merleau-Ponty`s philosophy of the body and Levinas’s existentialist notion of the origin of morality, the article emphasize empathy and the sense of responsibility as a fundamental event in our initial encounter with one another – not learned competence based on cognitive refl ections. <br />Anti-social behavior like bullying is therefore considered to be a narrowing of the initial openness for others entering our life-world, not a result of a natural urge to power and dominance.</p>

Understanding Others to Learn and Help Others Learn

2019 ◽  
pp. 167-190
Author(s):  
Hyowon Gweon
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Social Learning ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Young Age ◽  
Effective Learning ◽  
Learning From Others ◽  
Rational Decisions

Through learning from others and sharing what we know in our everyday social interactions, we learn things that go far beyond what we can directly experience. What makes human social learning so distinctive, powerful, and effective? This chapter reviews recent developmental evidence on how our understanding of others—basic aspects of human social cognition—can support effective learning and communication. Even at a young age, humans show remarkable abilities to reason about others’ minds to (1) draw sophisticated inferences from information provided by others, (2) use such information to evaluate others’ informativeness, and (3) actively teach and communicate information to others. These studies suggest that human social learning is rooted in the basic social-cognitive abilities to understand what others want, need, and know, as well as what is useful or costly for others. Such abilities allow even young children to make flexible and rational decisions to learn from others and teach others, providing foundations for the development of distinctively human social learning.

Conformity and Divergence in Interactions, Groups, and Culture

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bert H. Hodges
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Psychology ◽  
Social Learning ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
General Pattern ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Convergence And Divergence ◽  
Complex Patterns

Humans have a natural affinity for conformity and coordination that is essential to culture, to groups, and to dialogical relationships. It is equally true that the dynamics of relationships, groups, and culture depend on tendencies to diverge, to differentiate, and to dissent. Evidence from anthropology, as well as social, developmental, and cognitive psychology, reveals remarkably convergent accounts of the complex interplay of divergence and convergence in an array of contexts. Conversational alignment, synchrony, mimicry, imitation, majority-minority dynamics, dissent, trust, intra- and cross-cultural diversity, social learning, and the formation and development of cultures all reveal complex patterns of selectivity and fidelity that continue to surprise researchers. The general pattern is one illustrated by young children: They are most willing to be guided by those who tell the truth and those who care about others. Issues of convergence and divergence are fundamental social phenomena, and they deserve fresh attention.

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