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 Selective trust in young children and distracted adults: halo-effects outweigh rational choices

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonas Hermes ◽  
Franziska Brugger ◽  
hannes rakoczy ◽  
Tanya Behne
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Cognitive Strategies ◽  
Dual Process ◽  
Cognitive Resources ◽  
Older Children ◽  
Selective Trust ◽  
Rational Choices ◽  
Cognitive Foundations ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual

Research has shown that young children are selective in whom they trust, for example, learning selectively from the previously more reliable sources. To explain what cognitive foundations this capacity may build upon, is has recently been proposed that children recruit different kinds of cognitive strategies. These may include, on the one hand, simple heuristics such as favoring the overall better protagonist or those who score high on a salient, accessible characteristic, and, on the other hand, more systematic and cognitively effortful strategies, e.g., taking into account the individual properties of a protagonist. Based on such dual-process account, the present studies investigated the prediction that the more systematic processes require cognitive resources and develop with age. Children and adults were familiarized with two protagonists: The strong-and-shy protagonist scored high on a highly accessible trait (strength), whereas the weak-and-extraverted protagonist scored high on a less accessible trait (extraversion). In test trials, participants chose between these two protagonists for strength- and extraversion-related tasks. The results were consistent with the prediction of the dual-process account: Older children, and adults under normal conditions, showed a pattern of systematic reasoning, selecting the protagonists with the relevant trait for a given task. Yet, younger children, and adults whose cognitive capacities were burdened with a secondary task, showed a pattern of heuristic reasoning, selecting the strong-and-shy protagonist not only in the strength tasks but often also in the extraversion tasks. This is the first piece of direct evidence for the applicability of a dual-process account on selective trust.

The Rationality of (Over)imitation

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 678-687 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefanie Keupp ◽  
Tanya Behne ◽  
Hannes Rakoczy
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Learning Strategy ◽  
Social Constraints ◽  
Rational Action ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Human Capacity ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Cognitive Foundations ◽  
Different Levels

Imitation is a powerful and ubiquitous social learning strategy, fundamental for the development of individual skills and cultural traditions. Recent research on the cognitive foundations and development of imitation, though, presents a surprising picture: Although even infants imitate in selective, efficient, and rational ways, children and adults engage in overimitation. Rather than imitating selectively and efficiently, they sometimes faithfully reproduce causally irrelevant actions as much as relevant ones. In this article, we suggest a new perspective on this phenomenon by integrating established findings on children’s more general capacities for rational action parsing with newer findings on overimitation. We suggest that overimitation is a consequence of children’s growing capacities to understand causal and social constraints in relation to goals and that it rests on the human capacity to represent observed actions simultaneously on different levels of goal hierarchies.

Cross-Cultural Differences in the Valuing of Dominance by Young Children

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 256-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rawan Charafeddine ◽  
Hugo Mercier ◽  
Takahiro Yamada ◽  
Tomoko Matsui ◽  
Mioko Sudo ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
Developmental Research ◽  
Cross Cultural Differences ◽  
Cultural Research ◽  
Cross Cultural Research ◽  
Dominant Individual

AbstractDevelopmental research suggests that young children tend to value dominant individuals over subordinates. This research, however, has nearly exclusively been carried out in Western cultures, and cross-cultural research among adults has revealed cultural differences in the valuing of dominance. In particular, it seems that Japanese culture, relative to many Western cultures, values dominance less. We conducted two experiments to test whether this difference would be observed in preschoolers. In Experiment 1, preschoolers in France and in Japan were asked to identify with either a dominant or a subordinate. French preschoolers identified with the dominant, but Japanese preschoolers were at chance. Experiment 2 revealed that Japanese preschoolers were more likely to believe a subordinate than a dominant individual, both compared to chance and compared to previous findings among French preschoolers. The convergent results from both experiments thus reveal an early emerging cross-cultural difference in the valuing of dominance.

Social learning and teaching in chimpanzees

2013 ◽  
Vol 28 (6) ◽  
pp. 879-901 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Moore
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Learning And Teaching

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.

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