Disentangling the Social and the Pedagogical in Infants' Learning about Tool‐Use

Abstract

We investigated infants' response to pedagogy in the domain of tool use. In experiment 1, infants viewed a causally relevant tool-use demonstration presented identically in either a social/pedagogical or social/non-pedagogical context. Infants exposed to pedagogical cues displayed superior production of the tool-use sequence. This was so despite infants displaying equivalent attention to the demonstration across conditions. In contrast, pedagogical cues had no systematic impact on infants' discrimination between causally possible vs. impossible tool-use sequences in a looking-time task. Interestingly, however, older infants across both conditions displayed a preference for looking toward the causally possible display. Experiment 2 documented that social cues of any sort (regardless of pedagogy) accompanying the demonstration triggered older infants to discriminate the causally possible vs. impossible events whereas a non-social demonstration did not. Together, the two experiments implicate 'social gating'as well as a pedagogical stance in infants' processing and execution of causal action.

The emergence of tool use during the second year of life

“…But the absence of an early effect of demonstration may also be due to the way we provided the demonstration, which was relatively restricted in content and variety. If this is true, then adding more information to the demonstration such as pedagogical cues (e.g., Csibra & Gergely, 2006;Sage & Baldwin, 2011) and social cues (Kiraly, 2009;Nielsen, Simcock, & Jenkins, 2008), making the goal of the experimenter more obvious (Carpenter, Call, & Tomasello, 2002;Kiraly, 2009), and/or providing more instances would allow infants to learn the tool-use task from a demonstration earlier. In addition, as in many studies of social learning, we assessed infants' behavior directly after a demonstration.…”

Child‐directed teaching and social learning at 18 months of age: evidence from Yucatec Mayan andUSinfants

“…In several studies 11‐ to 18‐month‐old infants were more likely to faithfully copy others' actions when they were directly taught the action (e.g. when the actor looked at and talked to the infant), as compared to when they simply observed these actions (Brugger, Lariviere, Mumme & Bushnell, ; Király, Csibra & Gergely, ; Matheson, Moore & Akhtar, ; Nielsen, ; Sage & Baldwin, ; Shneidman, Todd & Woodward, ). For example, at 18 months, infants were more likely to imitate the particular means of a demonstrated novel action (like using the head to turn on a light, or an elbow to activate a switch) when an experimenter looked and talked to the infant while performing the action, as compared to when she talked to herself (Matheson et al ., ) or to another person (Shneidman et al ., ).…”

“…For example, at 18 months, infants were more likely to imitate the particular means of a demonstrated novel action (like using the head to turn on a light, or an elbow to activate a switch) when an experimenter looked and talked to the infant while performing the action, as compared to when she talked to herself (Matheson et al ., ) or to another person (Shneidman et al ., ). Differential imitation following child‐directed and observed events occurred even when infants deployed equal visual attention to these contexts, suggesting that child‐directed situations provide informational value beyond the ways in which they shape infants' attention in the moment (Sage & Baldwin, ; Shneidman et al ., ).…”

“…Given these properties of infants' early social experiences, in Study 1 we consider whether Yucatec Mayan infants display the same pattern of responses to child‐directed and observed contexts as infants from the United States have demonstrated in prior studies (e.g. Brugger et al ., ; Király et al ., ; Matheson et al ., ; Nielsen, ; Sage & Baldwin, ; Shneidman et al ., ). Using a nearly identical procedure as Shneidman et al .…”

Verbal labels increase the salience of novel objects for preschoolers with typical development and Williams syndrome, but not in autism

“…From infancy onward, children are more likely to pay attention to and acquire knowledge from stimuli that are accompanied by another’s communicative (“pedagogical”) cues, such as eye contact and infant-directed speech and body language [4–6]. For example, typically developing preschoolers are more likely to focus on and imitate a novel action if the model establishes mutual gaze before the demonstration [7, 8] or acts in a socially engaging manner [9, 10].…”