Young children copy cumulative technological design in the absence of action information

Scientific Reports
E ReindlC Tennie

Abstract

The ratchet effect - the accumulation of beneficial changes in cultural products beyond a level that individuals could reach on their own - is a topic of increasing interest. It is currently debated which social learning mechanisms allow for the generation and transmission of cumulative culture. This study focused on transmission, investigating whether 4- to 6-year-old children were able to copy cumulative technological design and whether they could do so without action information (emulation). We adapted the spaghetti tower task, previously used to test for accumulation of culture in human adults. A baseline condition established that the demonstrated tower design was beyond the innovation skills of individual children this age and so represented a culture-dependent product for them. There were 2 demonstration conditions: a full demonstration (actions plus (end-)results) and an endstate- demonstration (end-results only). Children in both demonstration conditions built taller towers than those in the baseline. Crucially, in both demonstration conditions some children also copied the demonstrated tower. We provide the first evidence that young children learn from, and that some of them even copy, cumulative technological design,...Continue Reading

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Citations

Jun 1, 2018·Proceedings. Biological Sciences·Helena Miton, Mathieu Charbonneau
Oct 25, 2017·Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences·Nicola McGuiganAndrew Whiten
Aug 21, 2019·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Patrick SchmidtClaudio Tennie
Sep 6, 2019·Animal Cognition·Lydia M Hopper, Andrew W Torrance
Jun 4, 2020·Biology Letters·Elisa BandiniClaudio Tennie
Jun 11, 2020·Proceedings. Biological Sciences·Marcel Montrey, Thomas R Shultz
Nov 20, 2019·The Behavioral and Brain Sciences·François Osiurak, Emanuelle Reynaud
Aug 11, 2020·The Behavioral and Brain Sciences·Emily Rachel Reed Burdett, Samuel Ronfard
Nov 19, 2020·Proceedings. Biological Sciences·Amanda J LucasAlex Thornton
Oct 24, 2020·Biology & Philosophy·Claudio TennieLydia M Hopper
Mar 30, 2021·Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society·Alba Motes-Rodrigo, Claudio Tennie
Aug 8, 2021·Trends in Cognitive Sciences·Dietrich Stout

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Software Mentioned

R
R package multcomp
package lme4
R package “ car ”

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