Limitations to the cultural ratchet effect in young children

Tennie, Claudio; Walter, Victoria; Gampe, Anja; Carpenter, Malinda; Tomasello, Michael

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2014.04.006

Cited by 23 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…This finding is noteworthy in light of research suggesting that children are in fact very capable of transmitting conventional knowledge and work to reinforce norms in contexts where they deem high fidelity imitation as the appropriate means of engaging in a novel behavior [46], and will do so along peer-peer chains [64]. Indeed, there is some evidence that when children interpret the purpose of a task as conventional, they persist in transmitting both causally irrelevant actions [52,65] and inefficient methods for achieving instrumental outcomes [66].…”

Section: The Functions Of Ritual In Social Group Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

Imitation and Innovation: The Dual Engines of Cultural Learning

Legare

Nielsen

2015

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

387

337

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Imitation and innovation work in tandem to support cultural learning in children and facilitate our capacity for cumulative culture. Here we propose an integrated theoretical account of how the unique demands of acquiring instrumental skills and cultural conventions provide insight into when children imitate, when they innovate, and to what degree. For instrumental learning, with an increase in experience, high fidelity imitation decreases and innovation increases. By contrast, for conventional learning, imitative fidelity stays high, regardless of experience, and innovation stays low. We synthesize cutting edge research on the development of imitative flexibility and innovation to provide insight into the social learning mechanisms underpinning the uniquely human mind.

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Section: The Functions Of Ritual In Social Group Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

Imitation and Innovation: The Dual Engines of Cultural Learning

Legare

Nielsen

2015

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

387

337

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“…Thus, some evidence for this is apparent in the studies of so-called 'transmission chains', in which young children learn something and then teach another (and then another down the chain; e.g., [26,27]). In addition, in the studies of norm enforcement cited above (e.g., [14]), in many cases when 3-year-old children corrected norm violators (e.g., 'No, it doesn't work like that'), they continued by instructing the violator about how to do it properly.…”

Section: Instructed Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

The ontogeny of cultural learning

Tomasello

2016

Current Opinion in Psychology

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All primates engage in one or another form of social learning. Humans engage in cultural learning. From very early in ontogeny human infants and young children do not just learn useful things from others, they conform to others in order to affiliate with them and to identify with the cultural group. The cultural group normatively expects such conformity, and adults actively instruct children so as to ensure it. Young children learn from this instruction how the world is viewed and how it works in their culture. These special forms of cultural learning enable powerful and species-unique processes of cumulative cultural evolution.Address

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“…As we noted in our introductory review, the literature addressing this topic through experiments remains limited, especially with children. The latter have focused on cumulative social learning, but either omitted the wider cultural diffusion necessary to identify 'innovation' as here defined [26,46,50], or employed a task that necessarily required cumulative steps for success, constraining inferences about the importance of cumulation in progressive achievements [47], or offered a task in which children could obtain no rewards other than transferring maximal quantities of rice between two containers, as an experimenter encouraged them to attempt [48]. Children showed little or no evidence of cumulative culture in the latter experiment; however, most could already spontaneously recognise adequate ways of transferring rice from the start.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A third study [48] used a diffusion chain design with five 'generations' in which young children were set a task of shifting as much rice from one container to another, with tool options ranging from a strip of card (least efficient) to a scoop and a bowl (most efficient). Some chains were seeded by an adult using the inefficient card, and others were unseeded.…”

Section: A Note On Terminologymentioning

confidence: 99%

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

McGuigan

Burdett

Burgess

et al. 2017

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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a.whiten@st-andrews.ac.uk 2 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

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Limitations to the cultural ratchet effect in young children

Cited by 23 publications

References 22 publications

Imitation and Innovation: The Dual Engines of Cultural Learning

Imitation and Innovation: The Dual Engines of Cultural Learning

The ontogeny of cultural learning

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

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