Dataset Information

Expanding the understanding of majority-bias in children's social learning.

ABSTRACT: Prior experiments with children across seven different societies have indicated U-shaped age patterns in the likelihood of copying majority demonstrations. It is unclear which learning strategies underlie the observed responses that create these patterns. Here we broaden the understanding of children's learning strategies by: (1) exploring social learning patterns among 6-13-year-olds (n = 270) from ethnolinguistically varied communities in Vanuatu; (2) comparing these data with those reported from other societies (n = 629), and (3) re-analysing our and previous data based on a theoretically plausible set of underlying strategies using Bayesian methods. We find higher rates of social learning in children from Vanuatu, a country with high linguistic and cultural diversity. Furthermore, our results provide statistical evidence for modest U-shaped age patterns for a more clearly delineated majority learning strategy across the current and previously investigated societies, suggesting that the developmental mechanisms structuring majority bias are cross-culturally highly recurrent and hence a fundamental feature of early human social learning.

SUBMITTER: Sibilsky A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9038790 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Expanding the understanding of majority-bias in children's social learning.

Sibilsky Anne A Colleran Heidi H McElreath Richard R Haun Daniel B M DBM

Scientific reports 20220425 1

Prior experiments with children across seven different societies have indicated U-shaped age patterns in the likelihood of copying majority demonstrations. It is unclear which learning strategies underlie the observed responses that create these patterns. Here we broaden the understanding of children's learning strategies by: (1) exploring social learning patterns among 6-13-year-olds (n = 270) from ethnolinguistically varied communities in Vanuatu; (2) comparing these data with those reported f ...[more]

PMID: 35468912

Similar Datasets

Project description:ObjectivesFor children to understand the emotional behavior of others, the first two steps involve emotion encoding and emotion interpreting, according to the Social Information Processing model. Access to daily social interactions is prerequisite to a child acquiring these skills, and barriers to communication such as hearing loss impede this access. Therefore, it could be challenging for children with hearing loss to develop these two skills. The present study aimed to understand the effect of prelingual hearing loss on children's emotion understanding, by examining how they encode and interpret nonverbal emotional cues in dynamic social situations.DesignSixty deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) children and 71 typically hearing (TH) children (3-10 years old, mean age 6.2 years, 54% girls) watched videos of prototypical social interactions between a target person and an interaction partner. At the end of each video, the target person did not face the camera, rendering their facial expressions out of view to participants. Afterward, participants were asked to interpret the emotion they thought the target person felt at the end of the video. As participants watched the videos, their encoding patterns were examined by an eye tracker, which measured the amount of time participants spent looking at the target person's head and body and at the interaction partner's head and body. These regions were preselected for analyses because they had been found to provide cues for interpreting people's emotions and intentions.ResultsWhen encoding emotional cues, both the DHH and TH children spent more time looking at the head of the target person and at the head of the interaction partner than they spent looking at the body or actions of either person. Yet, compared with the TH children, the DHH children looked at the target person's head for a shorter time (b = -0.03, p = 0.030), and at the target person's body (b = 0.04, p = 0.006) and at the interaction partner's head (b = 0.03, p = 0.048) for a longer time. The DHH children were also less accurate when interpreting emotions than their TH peers (b = -0.13, p = 0.005), and their lower scores were associated with their distinctive encoding pattern.ConclusionsThe findings suggest that children with limited auditory access to the social environment tend to collect visually observable information to compensate for ambiguous emotional cues in social situations. These children may have developed this strategy to support their daily communication. Yet, to fully benefit from such a strategy, these children may need extra support for gaining better social-emotional knowledge.

Project description:BackgroundStudies of natural animal populations reveal widespread evidence for the diffusion of novel behaviour patterns, and for intra- and inter-population variation in behaviour. However, claims that these are manifestations of animal 'culture' remain controversial because alternative explanations to social learning remain difficult to refute. This inability to identify social learning in social settings has also contributed to the failure to test evolutionary hypotheses concerning the social learning strategies that animals deploy.Methodology/principal findingsWe present a solution to this problem, in the form of a new means of identifying social learning in animal populations. The method is based on the well-established premise of social learning research, that--when ecological and genetic differences are accounted for--social learning will generate greater homogeneity in behaviour between animals than expected in its absence. Our procedure compares the observed level of homogeneity to a sampling distribution generated utilizing randomization and other procedures, allowing claims of social learning to be evaluated according to consensual standards. We illustrate the method on data from groups of monkeys provided with novel two-option extractive foraging tasks, demonstrating that social learning can indeed be distinguished from unlearned processes and a social learning, and revealing that the monkeys only employed social learning for the more difficult tasks. The method is further validated against published datasets and through simulation, and exhibits higher statistical power than conventional inferential statistics.Conclusions/significanceThe method is potentially a significant technological development, which could prove of considerable value in assessing the validity of claims for culturally transmitted behaviour in animal groups. It will also be of value in enabling investigation of the social learning strategies deployed in captive and natural animal populations.

Dataset Information

Expanding the understanding of majority-bias in children's social learning.

Publications

Expanding the understanding of majority-bias in children's social learning.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets