What is it about?
This study investigates whether young children can learn from and copy a material cultural product (a certain tower shape) that they themselves could not have invented. It also investigates whether children need action information in order to copy the product or whether seeing endstates only is also sufficient for children to acquire a novel material cultural product.
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Why is it important?
We already know that children are proficient social learners from early on, readily copying even arbitrary instrumental behaviors. However, these studies presented children with rather simple actions that children could also invent on their own. This study is the first one to investigate whether children can copy a cultural trait that they could not have invented individually, i.e., without access to social learning (as established via a baseline condition). Results show that children can copy such a novel material cultural product even without access to action information and thus contributes further evidence to the debate on whether emulation learning can be faithful enough for the transmission of cumulative technological design.
Perspectives
Lev Vygotsky (1978) already stated that young children are able to acquire novel cultural traits that they could not (yet) invent on their own via social learning and teaching (Zone of Proximal Development). Given the plausibility of this claim, it is surprising that it had not been explicitly tested yet with regard to the material cultural domain. This is the first study to provide empirical evidence that children can copy cumulative technological design that they could not have acquired without social learning.
Dr Eva Reindl
University of Birmingham
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Young children copy cumulative technological design in the absence of action information, Scientific Reports, May 2017, Nature,
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-01715-2.
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