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Wang C, Wang Z. The effects of model age and familiarity on children's reproduction of ritual behaviour. BRITISH JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 2023; 41:259-275. [PMID: 37019847 DOI: 10.1111/bjdp.12448] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/30/2022] [Accepted: 03/23/2023] [Indexed: 04/07/2023]
Abstract
Rituals are fundamental social acts that structure relationships and enable the filtering of important cognitive attributes (e.g. working memory and inhibitory control) that make humans what they are today. This study investigated the influence of model age and familiarity on the reproduction of ritual behaviour in five-year-old children. Through an exploration of these factors, this study sheds light on the cognitive mechanisms children use to comprehend and replicate rituals. Ninety-eight five-year-old children were divided into two groups: an experimental group, which observed an adult or child model, either familiar or unfamiliar to them, demonstrating eight ritual acts; and a control group, which received no video demonstration. The results revealed that children who observed an adult reproduced more ritual acts than those who observed a child, and children who observed unfamiliar models reproduced ritual acts more frequently than those who observed familiar ones. Additionally, when exposed to unfamiliar models, children's reproductive fidelity was higher. These findings suggest that children have the ability to address new adaptation challenges by participating in rituals at an early age and that they generate suitable solutions depending on the model's characteristics. This provides evidence for the adaptive bias in children's cultural learning from a ritual perspective.
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Affiliation(s)
- Chang Wang
- School of Education Science, Jiangsu Normal University, Xuzhou, China
| | - Zhidan Wang
- School of Education Science, Jiangsu Normal University, Xuzhou, China
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2
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Stengelin R, Ball R, Maurits L, Kanngiesser P, Haun DBM. Children over-imitate adults and peers more than puppets. Dev Sci 2023; 26:e13303. [PMID: 35818836 DOI: 10.1111/desc.13303] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/12/2021] [Revised: 06/24/2022] [Accepted: 06/28/2022] [Indexed: 11/28/2022]
Abstract
Researchers commonly use puppets in development science. Amongst other things, puppets are employed to reduce social hierarchies between child participants and adult experimenters akin to peer interactions. However, it remains controversial whether children treat puppets like real-world social partners in these settings. This study investigated children's imitation of causally irrelevant actions (i.e., over-imitation) performed by puppet, adult, or child models. Seventy-two German children (AgeRange = 4.6-6.5 years; 36 girls) from urban, socioeconomically diverse backgrounds observed a model retrieving stickers from reward containers. The model performed causally irrelevant actions either in contact with the reward container or not. Children were more likely to over-imitate adults' and peers' actions as compared to puppets' actions. Across models, they copied contact actions more than no-contact actions. While children imitate causally irrelevant actions from puppet models to some extent, their social learning from puppets does not necessarily match their social learning from real-world social agents, such as children or adults. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: We examined children's over-imitation from adult, child, and puppet models to validate puppetry as an approach to simulate non-hierarchical interactions. Children imitated adults and child models at slightly higher rates than puppets. This effect was present regardless of whether the irrelevant actions involved physical contact to the reward container or not. In our study children's social learning from puppets does not match their social learning from human models.
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Affiliation(s)
- Roman Stengelin
- Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.,Department of Psychology and Social Work, University of Namibia, Windhoek, Namibia
| | - Rabea Ball
- Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
| | - Luke Maurits
- Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
| | | | - Daniel B M Haun
- Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
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3
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The ontogeny of selective social learning: Young children flexibly adopt majority- or payoff-based biases depending on task uncertainty. J Exp Child Psychol 2021; 214:105307. [PMID: 34775162 DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2021.105307] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/02/2020] [Revised: 09/15/2021] [Accepted: 09/22/2021] [Indexed: 11/21/2022]
Abstract
Humans have adapted well to diverse environments in part because of their ability to efficiently acquire information from their social environment. However, we still know very little as to how young children acquire cultural knowledge and in particular the circumstances under which children prioritize social learning over asocial learning. In this study, we asked whether children will selectively adopt either a majority-biased or payoff-biased social learning strategy in the presence or absence of asocial learning. The 3- to 5-year-olds (N = 117) were first shown a video in which four other children took turns in retrieving a capsule housing a reward from one of two boxes. Three of the children (the "majority") retrieved a capsule from the same box, and a single individual (the "minority") retrieved a capsule from the alternative box. Across four conditions, we manipulated both the value of the rewards available in each box (equal or unequal payoff) and whether children had knowledge of the payoff before making their own selection. Results show that children adopted a majority-biased learning strategy when they were unaware of the value of the rewards available but adopted a payoff-biased strategy when the payoff was known to be unequal. We conclude that children are strategic social learners who integrate both social and asocial learning to maximize personal gain.
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Hopper LM, Jacobson SL, Howard LH. Problem solving flexibility across early development. J Exp Child Psychol 2020; 200:104966. [PMID: 32860967 PMCID: PMC7449664 DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2020.104966] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/03/2020] [Revised: 07/24/2020] [Accepted: 07/24/2020] [Indexed: 11/17/2022]
Abstract
We tested cognitive flexibility in 2-, 3, and 4-year-old children. Children were presented with a novel task previously used with nonhuman primates. All children spontaneously solved the task; most (83.61%) used an efficient method. Children responded flexibly when task demands changed. 4-year-olds were significantly more efficient than 2-year-olds.
Cognitive flexibility allows individuals to adapt to novel situations. However, this ability appears to develop slowly over the first few years of life, mediated by task complexity and opacity. We used a physically simple novel task, previously tested with nonhuman primates, to explore the development of flexible problem solving in 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old children from a developmental and comparative perspective. The task goal was to remove barriers (straws) from a clear tube to release a ball. The location of the ball, and therefore the number of straws necessary to retrieve it, varied across two test phases (four of five straws and two of five straws, respectively). In Test Phase 1, all children retrieved the ball in Trial 1 and 83.61% used the most efficient method (removing only straws below the ball). Across Phase 1 trials, 4-year-olds were significantly more efficient than 2-year-olds, and solve latency decreased for all age groups. Test Phase 2 altered the location of the ball, allowing us to explore whether children could flexibly adopt a more efficient solution when their original (now inefficient) solution remained available. In Phase 2, significantly more 4-year-olds than 2-year-olds were efficient; the older children showed greater competency with the task and were more flexible to changing task demands than the younger children. Interestingly, no age group was as flexible in Phase 2 as previously tested nonhuman primates, potentially related to their relatively reduced task exploration in Phase 1. Therefore, this causally clear task revealed changes in cognitive flexibility across both early childhood and species.
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Affiliation(s)
- Lydia M Hopper
- Lester E. Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago, IL 60614, USA.
| | - Sarah L Jacobson
- Program in Psychology, Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY 10016, USA
| | - Lauren H Howard
- Department of Psychology, Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, PA 17603, USA
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Altınok N, Hernik M, Király I, Gergely G. Acquiring sub-efficient and efficient variants of novel means by integrating information from multiple social models in preschoolers. J Exp Child Psychol 2020; 195:104847. [PMID: 32278116 DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2020.104847] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/06/2019] [Revised: 02/02/2020] [Accepted: 03/10/2020] [Indexed: 10/24/2022]
Abstract
Sub-efficient action routines often represent culture-specific conventional forms of actions that belong to the repertoire of cultural knowledge shared by a social group. Children readily acquire such sub-efficient routines from social demonstrations and often preserve them in their action repertoire despite encountering more efficient alternatives. This suggests that they can treat sub-efficient conventional forms and their efficient alternatives in a context-sensitive selective manner. We hypothesized that children may rely on their sensitivity to differentiate speakers of their own language versus a foreign language as an informative cue indicating whether the model belongs to their own cultural community and the action modeled represents shared cultural knowledge. We assessed preschoolers' imitation following two different demonstrations. The first model demonstrated a sub-efficient action sequence, whereas the second model presented a more efficient alternative to obtain the same goal. We varied whether the children had heard the models speak their own language or a foreign language before their nonverbal action demonstrations. We found that 4-year-olds adopted the second model's efficient alternative, but only when she spoke their own language. However, they disregarded the efficient alternative if it was presented by a foreign-language speaker and continued to perform the sub-efficient routine they initially acquired. Therefore, 4-year-olds employed the cue of shared language to optimize acquiring and maintaining culturally shared sub-efficient action routines by selectively updating their action repertoire relying on their language-based evaluation of the demonstrator's culture-specific competence. In contrast, 5- and 6-year-olds adopted the efficient alternative independently of the demonstrator's language. Possible reasons for this developmental trend are discussed.
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Affiliation(s)
- Nazlı Altınok
- Cognitive Development Center, Central European University, 1051 Budapest, Hungary.
| | - Mikołaj Hernik
- Department of Psychology, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, N-9037 Tromsø, Norway
| | - Ildikó Király
- Cognitive Development Center, Central European University, 1051 Budapest, Hungary; MTA-ELTE Momentum Social Minds Research Group, Eötvös Loránd University, 1064 Budapest, Hungary
| | - György Gergely
- Cognitive Development Center, Central European University, 1051 Budapest, Hungary
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Preschool children overimitate robots, but do so less than they overimitate humans. J Exp Child Psychol 2020; 191:104702. [DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2019.104702] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/08/2019] [Revised: 08/15/2019] [Accepted: 08/19/2019] [Indexed: 11/19/2022]
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Bazhydai M, Silverstein P, Parise E, Westermann G. Two-year-old children preferentially transmit simple actions but not pedagogically demonstrated actions. Dev Sci 2020; 23:e12941. [PMID: 31981382 DOI: 10.1111/desc.12941] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/26/2019] [Revised: 10/25/2019] [Accepted: 01/14/2020] [Indexed: 11/29/2022]
Abstract
Children are sensitive to both social and non-social aspects of the learning environment. Among social cues, pedagogical communication has been shown to not only play a role in children's learning, but also in their own active transmission of knowledge. Vredenburgh, Kushnir and Casasola, Developmental Science, 2015, 18, 645 showed that 2-year-olds are more likely to demonstrate an action to a naive adult after learning it in a pedagogical than in a non-pedagogical context. This finding was interpreted as evidence that pedagogically transmitted information has a special status as culturally relevant. Here we test the limits of this claim by setting it in contrast with an explanation in which the relevance of information is the outcome of multiple interacting social (e.g., pedagogical demonstration) and non-social properties (e.g., action complexity). To test these competing hypotheses, we varied both pedagogical cues and action complexity in an information transmission paradigm with 2-year-old children. In Experiment 1, children preferentially transmitted simple non-pedagogically demonstrated actions over pedagogically demonstrated more complex actions. In Experiment 2, when both actions were matched for complexity, we found no evidence of preferential transmission of pedagogically demonstrated actions. We discuss possible reasons for the discrepancy between our results and previous literature showing an effect of pedagogical cues on cultural transmission, and conclude that our results are compatible with the view that pedagogical and other cues interact, but incompatible with the theory of a privileged role for pedagogical cues.
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Affiliation(s)
| | - Priya Silverstein
- Psychology Department, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK.,School of Psychology, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK
| | - Eugenio Parise
- Psychology Department, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
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Kline MA, Gervais MM, Moya C, Boyd RT. Irrelevant‐action imitation is short‐term and contextual: Evidence from two under‐studied populations. Dev Sci 2019; 23:e12903. [DOI: 10.1111/desc.12903] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/07/2018] [Revised: 07/12/2019] [Accepted: 08/26/2019] [Indexed: 11/26/2022]
Affiliation(s)
| | - Matthew M. Gervais
- Department of Psychology Simon Fraser University Burnaby BC Canada
- Department of Psychology University of British Columbia Burnaby BC Canada
| | - Cristina Moya
- Department of Anthropology University of California Davis Davis CA USA
| | - Robert T. Boyd
- Institute of Human Origins School of Human Evolution and Social Change Arizona State University Tempe AZ USA
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Marsh LE, Ropar D, Hamilton AFDC. Are you watching me? The role of audience and object novelty in overimitation. J Exp Child Psychol 2019; 180:123-130. [PMID: 30655097 DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2018.12.010] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/20/2018] [Revised: 12/20/2018] [Accepted: 12/23/2018] [Indexed: 10/27/2022]
Abstract
This study tested whether overimitation is subject to an audience effect, and whether it is modulated by object novelty. A sample of 86 4- to 11-year-old children watched a demonstrator open novel and familiar boxes using sequences of necessary and unnecessary actions. The experimenter then observed the children, turned away, or left the room while the children opened the box. Children copied unnecessary actions more when the experimenter watched or when she left, but they copied less when she turned away. This parallels infant studies suggesting that turning away is interpreted as a signal of disengagement. Children displayed increased overimitation and reduced efficiency discrimination when opening novel boxes compared with familiar boxes. These data provide important evidence that object novelty is a critical component of overimitation.
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Affiliation(s)
- Lauren E Marsh
- School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG9 2RD, UK.
| | - Danielle Ropar
- School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG9 2RD, UK
| | - Antonia F de C Hamilton
- School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG9 2RD, UK; Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London WC1N 3AZ, UK
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11
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Nielsen M. The Social Glue of Cumulative Culture and Ritual Behavior. CHILD DEVELOPMENT PERSPECTIVES 2018. [DOI: 10.1111/cdep.12297] [Citation(s) in RCA: 23] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/30/2022]
Affiliation(s)
- Mark Nielsen
- University of Queensland
- University of Johannesburg
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