The ontogeny of selective social learning: Young children flexibly adopt majority- or payoff-based biases depending on task uncertainty.

Humans have adapted well to diverse environments in part because of their ability to efficiently acquire information from their social environment. However, we still know very little as to how young children acquire cultural knowledge and in particular the circumstances under which children prioritize social learning over asocial learning. In this study, we asked whether children will selectively adopt either a majority-biased or payoff-biased social learning strategy in the presence or absence of asocial learning. The 3- to 5-year-olds (N = 117) were first shown a video in which four other children took turns in retrieving a capsule housing a reward from one of two boxes. Three of the children (the "majority") retrieved a capsule from the same box, and a single individual (the "minority") retrieved a capsule from the alternative box. Across four conditions, we manipulated both the value of the rewards available in each box (equal or unequal payoff) and whether children had knowledge of the payoff before making their own selection. Results show that children adopted a majority-biased learning strategy when they were unaware of the value of the rewards available but adopted a payoff-biased strategy when the payoff was known to be unequal. We conclude that children are strategic social learners who integrate both social and asocial learning to maximize personal gain.

The Development of Selective Copying: Children's Learning From an Expert Versus Their Mother.

This study tested the prediction that, with age, children should rely less on familiarity and more on expertise in their selective social learning. Experiment 1 (N = 50) found that 5- to 6-year-olds copied the technique their mother used to extract a prize from a novel puzzle box, in preference to both a stranger and an established expert. This bias occurred despite children acknowledging the expert model's superior capability. Experiment 2 (N = 50) demonstrated a shift in 7- to 8-year-olds toward copying the expert. Children aged 9-10 years did not copy according to a model bias. The findings of a follow-up study (N = 30) confirmed that, instead, they prioritized their own-partially flawed-causal understanding of the puzzle box.

Is the tendency to conform influenced by the age of the majority?

The aim of the current study was to explore the influence that the age and the familiarity of a group majority has on copying fidelity in 4- to 6-year-old children. In Experiment 1, participants (N=120, Mage=68months) viewed five child models, all of whom were either younger than, the same age as, or older than themselves, open a puzzle box using an inefficient technique (four models) or an efficient technique (one model). In Experiment 2 (N=82, Mage=71months), the identical task was presented by groups of unfamiliar models. In both Experiments 1 and 2, a group of control participants saw an equal number of inefficient and efficient models. Results showed that the participants displayed conformity irrespective of the age, or the familiarity, of the individuals comprising the majority. However, the participants varied in their level of imitative fidelity depending on the identity of the group majority, with majorities that were either the same age as, or considerably older than, the participants eliciting the highest levels of over-imitation. In contrast, groups comprising individuals who were younger than the participants elicited a significantly lower level of over-imitation than that elicited by the same-aged and older majorities. We suggest that these findings demonstrate an interplay between conformist and model-based transmission biases.

The Influence of Receiver Status on Donor Prosociality in 6- to 11-Year-Old Children.

The aim of this study was to explore the interplay between donor prosociality and receiver status using a fixed-choice resource distribution paradigm. Sixty children aged 6-11 years allocated resources to two high-status adults and two lower status adults under three different payoff structures. The donor could choose between an egalitarian option and an option that either resulted in an allocation that favored either the donor (Prosocial) or the receiver (Envy), or one in which the donor sacrificed resources to maintain parity (Costly Sharing). The results showed that the interplay between receiver status, donor age, and the payoff structure was complex, with children displaying selective generosity in which the status of the receiver played a key role.

Developmental changes in the influence of conventional and instrumental cues on over-imitation in 3- to 6-year-old children.

Previous studies have shown that children in the preschool period are fastidious imitators who copy models with such high levels of fidelity that task efficiency may be compromised. This over-imitative tendency, and the pervasive nature of it, has led to many explorations and theoretical interpretations of this behavior, including social, causal, and conventional explanations. In support of the conventional account, recent research has shown that children are more likely to over-imitate when the task is framed using conventional verbal cues than when it is framed using instrumental verbal cues. The aim of the current study was to determine whether 3- to 6-year-old children (N=185, mean age=60 months) would over-imitate when presented with instrumental and conventional verbal cues, which varied only minimally and were more directly comparable between instrumental and conventional contexts than those used in previous studies. In addition to varying the overall context, we also varied the instrumental prompt used such that the cues provided ranged in the extent to which they provided explicit instruction to omit the irrelevant actions. Counter to our predictions, and the high levels of over-imitation witnessed in previous studies, the older children frequently over-imitated irrespective of the context provided, whereas the youngest children over-imitated selectively, including the irrelevant actions only when the task was presented in a conventional frame. We propose that the age differences found following an instrumental presentation are a result of the youngest children being more open to the motivation of learning the causality of the task, whereas the older children were more strongly motivated to adopt a social convention.

"Model age-based" and "copy when uncertain" biases in children's social learning of a novel task.

Theoretical models of social learning predict that individuals can benefit from using strategies that specify when and whom to copy. Here the interaction of two social learning strategies, model age-based biased copying and copy when uncertain, was investigated. Uncertainty was created via a systematic manipulation of demonstration efficacy (completeness) and efficiency (causal relevance of some actions). The participants, 4- to 6-year-old children (N=140), viewed both an adult model and a child model, each of whom used a different tool on a novel task. They did so in a complete condition, a near-complete condition, a partial demonstration condition, or a no-demonstration condition. Half of the demonstrations in each condition incorporated causally irrelevant actions by the models. Social transmission was assessed by first responses but also through children's continued fidelity, the hallmark of social traditions. Results revealed a bias to copy the child model both on first response and in continued interactions. Demonstration efficacy and efficiency did not affect choice of model at first response but did influence solution exploration across trials, with demonstrations containing causally irrelevant actions decreasing exploration of alternative methods. These results imply that uncertain environments can result in canalized social learning from specific classes of model.

The influence of peers on the tendency of 3- and 4-year-old children to over-imitate.

Human children have frequently been shown to be high-fidelity imitators who faithfully reproduce the actions performed by a model. Curiously, children do not always appear to copy actions rationally and often copy in situations where doing so will lead to a reduction in task efficiency. This over-imitative tendency has been explored extensively with respect to adult models, but we know very little of the influence that peers can have on the fidelity of copying behavior. In an initial experiment, 3- and 4-year-old children watched two peers retrieve a reward from a puzzle box using a sequence of actions that were either causally relevant or causally irrelevant to reward retrieval. On completion of the task demonstrations, one model left the testing room, leaving the children to perform the task in the presence of the remaining efficient or inefficient peer. The results showed that, rather than copying the strategy of the peer who was physically present, the children displayed "blanket efficiency" and rarely reproduced the causally irrelevant actions. Intriguingly, the children switched from their previously efficient behavior when they were exposed to additional peer models who performed the causally irrelevant actions. The switch to an inefficient approach appeared to result from normative conformity because the children failed to reproduce the causally irrelevant actions when allowed to perform the task one final time in private. We suggest that the influence of the majority, although detrimental to task efficiency in this case, is a key cornerstone of human cultural evolution.

The influence of model status on the tendency of young children to over-imitate.

The current study aimed to integrate the trust and over-imitation literatures by allowing groups of 5-year-old children to view one of four adult models, differing in their level of status (high or low), retrieve a reward from inside a transparent puzzle box. Each of the models performed a sequence of tool actions on the box before retrieving the reward. These actions varied according to their causal necessity, with some of the actions being causally necessary for reward retrieval and others being causally irrelevant. The results suggest that young children are selective copiers, reproducing the irrelevant tool actions most frequently after having viewed the high-status models. It is suggested that this bias toward rank-ordered copying is likely to be a strategy favored by natural selection because the behaviors displayed by high-status individuals are often the behaviors that are locally adaptive and may, by extension, provide copiers with a selective advantage within their environment.

Information transmission in young children: when social information is more important than nonsocial information.

The authors' aim was to use a highly novel open diffusion paradigm to investigate the transmission of social information (i.e., gossip) and general knowledge within 2 groups of 10- and 11-year-old children. Four children, 2 from each group, acted as a primed information source, selected on the basis of sex and dominance ranking (high or low) within the group. Each source received 1 piece of gossip and 1 piece of general knowledge from the experimenter during natural class interaction, and the information was allowed to diffuse naturally within the group. Results revealed that gossip was transmitted more frequently than knowledge, and that male sources were more likely to transmit gossip than female sources. The relationship between characteristics of the source, and characteristics of the gossip recipient, also appeared influential with the dominant male source transmitting gossip to exclusively to friends, and the nondominant male source transmitting to individuals of higher peer regard than themselves.

Context congruence: How associative learning modulates cultural evolution.

The adoption of cultural variants by learners is affected by multiple factors including the prestige of the model and the value and frequency of different variants. However, little is known about what affects onward cultural transmission, or the choice of variants that models produce to pass on to new learners. This study investigated the effects on this choice of congruence between two contexts: the one in which variants are learned and the one in which they are later transmitted on. We hypothesized that when we are placed in a particular context, we will be more likely to produce (and therefore transmit) variants that we learned in that same (congruent) context. In particular, we tested the effect of a social contextual aspect-the relationship between model and learner. Our participants learned two methods to solve a puzzle, a variant from an "expert" (in an expert-to-novice context) and another one from a "peer" (in a peer-to-peer context). They were then asked to transmit one method onward, either to a "novice" (in a new expert-to-novice context) or to another "peer" (in a new peer-to-peer context). Participants were, overall, more likely to transmit the variant learned from an expert, evidencing an effect of by prestige bias. Crucially, in support of our hypothesis, they were also more likely to transmit the variant they had learned in the congruent context. Parameter estimation computer simulations of the experiment revealed that congruence bias was stronger than prestige bias.

Collective knowledge and the dynamics of culture in chimpanzees.

Social learning in non-human primates has been studied experimentally for over 120 years, yet until the present century this was limited to what one individual learns from a single other. Evidence of group-wide traditions in the wild then highlighted the collective context for social learning, and broader 'diffusion experiments' have since demonstrated transmission at the community level. In the present article, we describe and set in comparative perspective three strands of our recent research that further explore the collective dimensions of culture and cumulative culture in chimpanzees. First, exposing small communities of chimpanzees to contexts incorporating increasingly challenging, but more rewarding tool use opportunities revealed solutions arising through the combination of different individuals' discoveries, spreading to become shared innovations. The second series of experiments yielded evidence of conformist changes from habitual techniques to alternatives displayed by a unanimous majority of others but implicating a form of quorum decision-making. Third, we found that between-group differences in social tolerance were associated with differential success in developing more complex tool use to exploit an increasingly inaccessible resource. We discuss the implications of this array of findings in the wider context of related studies of humans, other primates and non-primate species. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines'.

Emulation and "overemulation" in the social learning of causally opaque versus causally transparent tool use by 23- and 30-month-olds.

We explored whether a rising trend to blindly "overcopy" a model's causally irrelevant actions between 3 and 5 years of age, found in previous studies, predicts a more circumspect disposition in much younger children. Children between 23 and 30 months of age observed a model use a tool to retrieve a reward from either a transparent or opaque puzzle box. Some of the tool actions were irrelevant to reward retrieval, whereas others were causally necessary. The causal relevance of the tool actions was highly visible in the transparent box condition, allowing the participants to potentially discriminate which actions were necessary. In contrast, the causal efficacy of the tool was hidden in the opaque box condition. When both the 23- and 30-month-olds were presented with either the transparent or opaque box, they were most commonly emulative rather than imitative, performing only the causally necessary actions. This strategy contrasts with the blanket imitation of both causally irrelevant and causally relevant actions witnessed at 3 and 5 years of age in our previous studies. The results challenge a current view of 1- and 2-year-olds as largely "blind imitators"; instead, they show that these young children have a variety of social learning processes available to them. More broadly the emerging patterns of results suggest, rather counterintuitively, that the human species becomes more imitative rather than less imitative with age, in some ways "mindlessly" so.

Does the direction in which a figure is looking influence whether it is visible?

Previous studies have shown that young preschool children are highly sensitive to mutual engagement and struggle to diagnose the visibility of a figure when their facial area is occluded. The present study aimed to explore the specificity of engagement by varying (a) the orientation of a figure relative to an observer and (b) the visible area of the figure's body. Results indicated that young children are sensitive to the orientation of the figure and the presence of a salient barrier over the figure's eyes. These results paint a more complex picture of the development of percept diagnosis skills than those that J. H. Flavell, S. G. Shipstead, & K. Croft (1980) outlined.

Can young preschool children be trained to perform percept deprivation tasks?

Young preschool children aged 2 and 3 years were exposed to a novel paradigm designed to train visual perception skills. The results indicate that children of this age can be trained to perform a percept deprivation task that requires a sophisticated understanding of attention not normally mastered until 3.5-4 years. Results are discussed with reference to engagement, a precursor to an adult-like understanding of perception.

The Effect of Dog-Assisted Intervention on Student Well-Being, Mood, and Anxiety.

This novel, exploratory study investigated the effect of a short, 20 min, dog-assisted intervention on student well-being, mood, and anxiety. One hundred and thirty-two university students were allocated to either an experimental condition or one of two control conditions. Each participant completed the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-Being Scale (WEMBS), the State Trait Anxiety Scale (STAI), and the UWIST Mood Adjective Checklist (UMACL) both before, and after, the intervention. The participants in the experimental condition interacted with both the dogs and their handlers, whereas the control groups interacted with either the dog only, or the handler only. The analyses revealed a significant difference across conditions for each measure, with those conditions in which a dog was present leading to significant improvements in mood and well-being, as well as a significant reduction in anxiety. Interestingly, the presence of a handler alongside the dog appeared to have a negative, and specific, effect on participant mood, with greater positive shifts in mood being witnessed when participants interacted with the dog alone, than when interacting with both the dog and the handler. These findings show that even a short 20 min session with a therapy dog can be an effective alternative intervention to improve student well-being, anxiety, and mood.

Young children display an increase in prosocial donating in response to an upwards shift in generosity by a same-aged peer.

Adult humans frequently engage in the reciprocal exchange of resources with other individuals. However, despite the important role that reciprocity plays in maintaining co-operative exchange we know relatively little of when, and how, reciprocity develops. We first asked whether pairs of young children (M = 74 months) would engage in direct reciprocity in a 'prosocial choice test' where a donor could select either a higher, or a lower, value reward (1v 2) for a partner at no cost to themselves (1v 1). In a subsequent retest we asked, for the first time, whether young children increase their level of prosocial donating in response to an upwards shift in generosity from an initially selfish partner. In order to determine whether interacting with another child was fundamental to the development of reciprocity we included a novel yoked non-agent condition. The results suggest that the children were engaging in a calculated form of reciprocity where the prior behavior of their child partner influenced their subsequent level of donation days after the initial exchange. Crucially we show that the children were not influenced by the value of the rewards received per se, rather selection by a human agent was key to reciprocity.

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

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 when children worked only by themselves, or if groups faced only the highest-level challenges from the start. Further experiments that introduced higher-level inventions via the inclusion of older children, or that created ecological change, with the easiest habitual solutions no longer possible, encouraged higher levels of cumulative innovation. Our results show children are not merely 'cultural sponges', but when acting in groups, display the beginnings of cycles of innovation and observational learning that sustain cumulative progress in problem solving.This article is part of the themed issue 'Process and pattern in innovations from cells to societies'.

Does the Age and Familiarity of the Informant Group Influence the Tendency of 3- and 4-year-old Children to Conform?

The authors' aim was to explore whether the age and the familiarity of the individuals comprising a group majority influenced the tendency of 3- and 4-year-old children to conform. Participants were presented with 2 variants of a novel task in which they were required to judge which of 3 line-drawn tigers had the greatest number of stripes. The participants made their judgments in 2 contexts, first after viewing 5 informants perform the task incorrectly, and second without viewing the responses of other individuals. The informants comprised a group of familiar children, a group of unfamiliar children, a group of familiar adults, or a group of unfamiliar adults. The results showed that the children displayed selective conformity with respect to informant age, readily adopting the incorrect response when it was indicated by an adult majority, but failing to do so when the same incorrect response was indicated by a majority of children. In contrast the familiarity of the individuals comprising the majority had little influence on the tendency of children to conform. These results suggest that children are not blanket conformists, rather they respond selectively depending on characteristics of the individuals comprising the group majority.

Social Learning in the Real-World: 'Over-Imitation' Occurs in Both Children and Adults Unaware of Participation in an Experiment and Independently of Social Interaction.

The current study avoided the typical laboratory context to determine instead whether over-imitation-the disposition to copy even visibly, causally unnecessary actions-occurs in a real-world context in which participants are unaware of being in an experiment. We disguised a puzzle-box task as an interactive item available to the public within a science engagement zone of Edinburgh Zoo. As a member of the public approached, a confederate acting as a zoo visitor retrieved a reward from the box using a sequence of actions containing both causally relevant and irrelevant elements. Despite the absence of intentional demonstration, or social pressure to copy, a majority of both child and even adult observers included all causally irrelevant actions in their reproduction. This occurred even though causal irrelevance appeared manifest because of the transparency of the puzzle-box. That over-imitation occurred so readily in a naturalistic context, devoid of social interaction and pressure, suggests that humans are opportunistic social learners throughout the lifespan, copying the actions of other individuals even when these actions are not intentionally demonstrated, and their causal significance is not readily apparent. The disposition to copy comprehensively, even when a mere onlooker, likely provides humans, irrespective of their age, with a powerful mechanism to extract maximal information from the social environment.

Do Children Copy an Expert or a Majority? Examining Selective Learning in Instrumental and Normative Contexts.

This study examined whether instrumental and normative learning contexts differentially influence 4- to 7-year-old children's social learning strategies; specifically, their dispositions to copy an expert versus a majority consensus. Experiment 1 (N = 44) established that children copied a relatively competent "expert" individual over an incompetent individual in both kinds of learning context. In experiment 2 (N = 80) we then tested whether children would copy a competent individual versus a majority, in each of the two different learning contexts. Results showed that individual children differed in strategy, preferring with significant consistency across two different test trials to copy either the competent individual or the majority. This study is the first to show that children prefer to copy more competent individuals when shown competing methods of achieving an instrumental goal (Experiment 1) and provides new evidence that children, at least in our "individualist" culture, may consistently express either a competency or majority bias in learning both instrumental and normative information (Experiment 2). This effect was similar in the instrumental and normative learning contexts we applied.