Nicola McGuigan

Cultural transmission of irrelevant tool actions in diffusion chains of 3- and 5-year-old children

We used the diffusion chain method in order to investigate whether irrelevant actions would be transmitted along chains of 3- and 5-year-old children. Four chains of eight children witnessed a trained “expert” child perform a sequence of actions in order to retrieve a reward from either a transparent or an opaque puzzle box. The action sequence involved both goal relevant and goal irrelevant actions. In the transparent box chains the participants could potentially determine which of the actions were irrelevant as the causal effects were clearly visible. Results indicated that irrelevant actions transmitted down chains of 3-year-old children irrespective of box transparency. In contrast, irrelevant actions dropped out of the transparent box chain extremely quickly at 5 years, but were maintained within the opaque chain. These findings highlight the power of the diffusion chain method as a tool for exploring cultural learning.

The relation between hiding skill and judgment of eye direction in preschool children

This study examines J. H. Flavell, S. G. Shipstead, and K. Crofts (1978) finding that 2 1/2-year-old children can hide an object behind a screen but cannot achieve the same result by placing the screen in front of the object. Experiment 1 replicated this finding alongside a task in which children judged what a person in a picture was looking at. Performance on the move-object task approached ceiling; performances on the move-screen and looking-where tasks were highly correlated even after age and control task performance were partialed out (r = .54, p < .01). Experiment 2 examined whether the finding resulted because the object was more interesting to manipulate than the screen. The move-object task remained easier than the move-screen task with an interesting screen and a dull object. The move-screen task again correlated specifically with the looking-where task. Results are explained in terms of engagement, a precursor to a mature understanding of attention.

The influence of model status on the tendency of young children to over-imitate

The current study aimed to integrate the trust and over-imitation literatures by allowing groups of 5-year-old children to view one of four adult models, differing in their level of status (high or low), retrieve a reward from inside a transparent puzzle box. Each of the models performed a sequence of tool actions on the box before retrieving the reward. These actions varied according to their causal necessity, with some of the actions being causally necessary for reward retrieval and others being causally irrelevant. The results suggest that young children are selective copiers, reproducing the irrelevant tool actions most frequently after having viewed the high-status models. It is suggested that this bias toward rank-ordered copying is likely to be a strategy favored by natural selection because the behaviors displayed by high-status individuals are often the behaviors that are locally adaptive and may, by extension, provide copiers with a selective advantage within their environment.

Is the Cultural Transmission of Irrelevant Tool Actions in Adult Humans (Homo Sapiens) Best Explained as the Result of an Evolved Conformist Bias

Background Recent studies of social learning have revealed that adult humans are “over-imitators” who frequently reproduce a models causally irrelevant tool actions to the detriment of task efficiency. At present our knowledge of adult over-imitation is limited to the fact that adults do over-imitate, we know very little about the causes of this behavior. The current study aimed to provide novel insights into adult over-imitation by extending a paradigm recently used with human children to explore social aspects of over-imitation. In the child study observers saw two models demonstrate a tool-use task using the same inefficient approach, or two models demonstrate different approaches to the task (one inefficient and one efficient). The manipulation of social influence came in the testing phase where the observer completed the task in the presence of either an inefficient model or an efficient model. Methodology/Principal Findings We adapted the paradigm used in the child study to provide the first systematic exploration of factors which may lead to adult over-imitation including: 1) the presence of the model(s) during testing, 2) the presence of a competing efficient task demonstration, 3) the presence of a majority displaying the inefficient approach, and 4) the ‘removal’ of the experimental context during task completion. We show that the adult participants only over-imitated in conditions where the inefficient strategy was the majority approach witnessed. This tendency towards over-imitation was almost entirely eliminated when the participants interacted with the task when they believed the experiment to be complete. Conclusions Our results suggest that adult over-imitation is best explained as a result of an evolved ‘conformist bias’ argued to be crucial to the transmission of human cultural behavior and one which may be unique in the animal kingdom.

Head and shoulders, knees and toes: Which parts of the body are necessary to be seen?

Children aged 2 and 3 years were tested for a previously neglected form of knowledge about visual perception; namely, whether an observer can see a figure that is partially occluded. The results indicate that for children of this age the visibility of a figures face is crucial for judging visibility, whereas the visibility of the legs is not. This phenomenon is limited to human-like figures. Results are explained in terms of engagement, a precursor to a mature understanding of attention.

Developmental changes in the influence of conventional and instrumental cues on over-imitation in 3- to 6-year-old children

Previous studies have shown that children in the preschool period are fastidious imitators who copy models with such high levels of fidelity that task efficiency may be compromised. This over-imitative tendency, and the pervasive nature of it, has led to many explorations and theoretical interpretations of this behavior, including social, causal, and conventional explanations. In support of the conventional account, recent research has shown that children are more likely to over-imitate when the task is framed using conventional verbal cues than when it is framed using instrumental verbal cues. The aim of the current study was to determine whether 3- to 6-year-old children (N=185, mean age=60 months) would over-imitate when presented with instrumental and conventional verbal cues, which varied only minimally and were more directly comparable between instrumental and conventional contexts than those used in previous studies. In addition to varying the overall context, we also varied the instrumental prompt used such that the cues provided ranged in the extent to which they provided explicit instruction to omit the irrelevant actions. Counter to our predictions, and the high levels of over-imitation witnessed in previous studies, the older children frequently over-imitated irrespective of the context provided, whereas the youngest children over-imitated selectively, including the irrelevant actions only when the task was presented in a conventional frame. We propose that the age differences found following an instrumental presentation are a result of the youngest children being more open to the motivation of learning the causality of the task, whereas the older children were more strongly motivated to adopt a social convention.

Do children copy an expert or a majority? Examining selective learning in instrumental and normative contexts

This study examined whether instrumental and normative learning contexts differentially influence 4- to 7-year-old children’s social learning strategies; specifically, their dispositions to copy an expert versus a majority consensus. Experiment 1 (N = 44) established that children copied a relatively competent “expert” individual over an incompetent individual in both kinds of learning context. In experiment 2 (N = 80) we then tested whether children would copy a competent individual versus a majority, in each of the two different learning contexts. Results showed that individual children differed in strategy, preferring with significant consistency across two different test trials to copy either the competent individual or the majority. This study is the first to show that children prefer to copy more competent individuals when shown competing methods of achieving an instrumental goal (Experiment 1) and provides new evidence that children, at least in our “individualist” culture, may consistently express either a competency or majority bias in learning both instrumental and normative information (Experiment 2). This effect was similar in the instrumental and normative learning contexts we applied.

Social Learning in the Real-World: ‘Over-Imitation’ Occurs in Both Children and Adults Unaware of Participation in an Experiment and Independently of Social Interaction

The current study avoided the typical laboratory context to determine instead whether over-imitation—the disposition to copy even visibly, causally unnecessary actions—occurs in a real-world context in which participants are unaware of being in an experiment. We disguised a puzzle-box task as an interactive item available to the public within a science engagement zone of Edinburgh Zoo. As a member of the public approached, a confederate acting as a zoo visitor retrieved a reward from the box using a sequence of actions containing both causally relevant and irrelevant elements. Despite the absence of intentional demonstration, or social pressure to copy, a majority of both child and even adult observers included all causally irrelevant actions in their reproduction. This occurred even though causal irrelevance appeared manifest because of the transparency of the puzzle-box. That over-imitation occurred so readily in a naturalistic context, devoid of social interaction and pressure, suggests that humans are opportunistic social learners throughout the lifespan, copying the actions of other individuals even when these actions are not intentionally demonstrated, and their causal significance is not readily apparent. The disposition to copy comprehensively, even when a mere onlooker, likely provides humans, irrespective of their age, with a powerful mechanism to extract maximal information from the social environment.

Information Transmission in Young Children: When Social Information Is More Important Than Nonsocial Information

ABSTRACT The authors’ aim was to use a highly novel open diffusion paradigm to investigate the transmission of social information (i.e., gossip) and general knowledge within 2 groups of 10- and 11-year-old children. Four children, 2 from each group, acted as a primed information source, selected on the basis of sex and dominance ranking (high or low) within the group. Each source received 1 piece of gossip and 1 piece of general knowledge from the experimenter during natural class interaction, and the information was allowed to diffuse naturally within the group. Results revealed that gossip was transmitted more frequently than knowledge, and that male sources were more likely to transmit gossip than female sources. The relationship between characteristics of the source, and characteristics of the gossip recipient, also appeared influential with the dominant male source transmitting gossip to exclusively to friends, and the nondominant male source transmitting to individuals of higher peer regard than themselves.

Innovation and social transmission in experimental micro-societies: Exploring the scope of cumulative culture in young children

The experimental study of cumulative culture and the innovations essential to it is a young science, with child studies so rare that the scope of cumulative cultural capacities in childhood remains largely unknown. Here we report a new experimental approach to the inherent complexity of these phenomena. Groups of 3–4-year-old children were presented with an elaborate array of challenges affording the potential cumulative development of a variety of techniques to gain increasingly attractive rewards. In contrast to a prior study, we found evidence for elementary forms of cumulative cultural progress, with inventions of solutions at lower levels spreading to become shared innovations, and some children then building on these to create more advanced but more rewarding innovations. This contrasted with markedly more constrained progress when children worked only by themselves, or if groups faced only the highest-level challenges from the start. Further experiments that introduced higher-level inventions via the inclusion of older children, or that created ecological change, with the easiest habitual solutions no longer possible, encouraged higher levels of cumulative innovation. Our results show children are not merely ‘cultural sponges’, but when acting in groups, display the beginnings of cycles of innovation and observational learning that sustain cumulative progress in problem solving. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Process and pattern in innovations from cells to societies’.