Intuitive invention by summative imitation in children and adults

People overlook subtractive changes differently depending on age, culture, and task

Previous work has explored transformative strategies that adds or removes components to change an original structure or state, and showed that adults tend to search for additive solutions far more often than subtractive ones. In the current study, we replicated a Lego building task and a grid-based symmetry task from a previous study, and also introduced a novel digital puzzle task. We investigated limitations in the previous study as well as extended the investigation of the subtraction neglect in a sample of children and across two cultures. Results partially confirm previous results, and extends the literature by showing that 9-10 year old children were more likely to ignore subtractive transformations than adults. However, we found both task-based and cultural variations in strategy use in adults from Sweden and the USA. We conclude that a subtraction neglect involves complex cognitive processes that are dependent on the task, culture, and age.

Generative cultural learning in children and adults: the role of compositionality and generativity in cultural evolution

Are human cultures distinctively cumulative because they are uniquely compositional? We addressed this question using a summative learning paradigm where participants saw different models build different tower elements, consisting of discrete actions and objects: stacking cubes (tower base) and linking squares (tower apex). These elements could be combined to form a tower that was optimal in terms of height and structural soundness. In addition to measuring copying fidelity, we explored whether children and adults (i) extended the knowledge demonstrated to additional tower elements and (ii) productively combined them. Results showed that children and adults copied observed demonstrations and applied them to novel exemplars. However, only adults in the imitation condition combined the two newly derived base and apex, relative to adults in a control group. Nonetheless, there were remarkable similarities between children's and adults' performance across measures. Composite measures capturing errors and overall generativity in children's and adults' performance produced few population by condition interactions. Results suggest that early in development, humans possess a suite of cognitive skills-compositionality and generativity-that transforms phylogenetically widespread social learning competencies into something that may be unique to our species, cultural learning; allowing human cultures to evolve towards greater complexity.

Social Robots as Creativity Eliciting Agents

Can robots help children be more creative? In this work, we posit social robots as creativity support tools for children in collaborative interactions. Children learn creative expressions and behaviors through social interactions with others during playful and collaborative tasks, and socially emulate their peers' and teachers' creativity. Social robots have a unique ability to engage in social and emotional interactions with children that can be leveraged to foster creative expression. We focus on two types of social interactions: creativity demonstration, where the robot exhibits creative behaviors, and creativity scaffolding, where the robot poses challenges, suggests ideas, provides positive reinforcement, and asks questions to scaffold children's creativity. We situate our research in three playful and collaborative tasks - the Droodle Creativity game (that affords verbal creativity), the MagicDraw game (that affords figural creativity), and the WeDo construction task (that affords constructional creativity), that children play with Jibo, a social robot. To evaluate the efficacy of the robot's social behaviors in enhancing creative behavior and expression in children, we ran three randomized controlled trials with 169 children in the 5-10 yr old age group. In the first two tasks, the robot exhibited creativity demonstration behaviors. We found that children who interacted with the robot exhibiting high verbal creativity in the Droodle game and high figural creativity in the MagicDraw game also exhibited significantly higher creativity than a control group of participants who interacted with a robot that did not express creativity (p < 0.05*). In the WeDo construction task, children who interacted with the robot that expressed creative scaffolding behaviors (asking reflective questions, generating ideas and challenges, and providing positive reinforcement) demonstrated higher creativity than participants in the control group by expressing a greater number of ideas, more original ideas, and more varied use of available materials (p < 0.05*). We found that both creativity demonstration and creativity scaffolding can be leveraged as social mechanisms for eliciting creativity in children using a social robot. From our findings, we suggest design guidelines for pedagogical tools and social agent interactions to better support children's creativity.

Spreading the game: An experimental study on the link between children's overimitation and their adoption, transmission, and modification of conventional information

Overimitation is hypothesized to foster the spread of conventional information within populations. The current study tested this claim by assigning 5-year-old children (N = 64) to one of two study populations based on their overimitation (overimitators [OIs] vs. non-overimitators [non-OIs]). Children were presented with conventional information in the form of novel games lacking instrumental outcomes, and we observed children's adoption, transmission, and modification of this information across two study phases. Results reveal little variation across study populations in the number of game elements that were adopted and transmitted. However, OIs were more likely to use normative language than non-OIs when transmitting game information to their peers. Furthermore, non-OIs modified the games more frequently in the initial study phase, suggesting an inverse relationship between children's overimitation and their tendency to modify conventional information. These findings indicate subtle yet coherent links between children's overimitation and their tendency to transmit and modify conventional information.

Toddlers, Tools, and Tech: The Cognitive Ontogenesis of Innovation

The development of tool innovation presents a paradox. How do humans have such diverse and complex technology, ranging from smartphones to aircraft, and yet young children find even simple tool innovation challenges, such as fashioning a hook to retrieve a basket from a tube, remarkably difficult? We propose that the solution to this paradox is the cognitive ontogenesis of tool innovation. Using a common measure of children's tool innovation, we describe how multiple cognitive mechanisms work in concert at each step of its process: recognizing the problem, generating appropriate solutions, and the social transmission of innovations. We discuss what the ontogeny of this skill tells us about cognitive and cultural evolution and provide recommendations for future research.