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

ABSTRACT: 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 contra

SUBMITTER: McGuigan N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5665812 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature