Journal
TRENDS IN COGNITIVE SCIENCES
Volume 25, Issue 10, Pages 896-910Publisher
CELL PRESS
DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2021.07.008
Keywords
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Funding
- James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholars Award for Understanding Human Cognition
- Jacobs Foundation Early Career Research Fellowship
- NSF [BCS-2019567]
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Social learning and teaching can both be characterized as probabilistic inferences guided by an intuitive understanding of how people think, plan, and act. Research shows that even young children draw rich inferences from evidence provided by others and generate informative evidence that helps others learn.
Social learning is often portrayed as a passive process of copying and trusting others. This view, however, does not fully capture what makes human social learning so powerful: social information is often 'curated' by helpful teachers. I argue that both learning from others (social learning) and helping others learn (teaching) can be characterized as probabilistic inferences guided by an intuitive understanding of how people think, plan, and act. Consistent with this idea, even young children draw rich inferences from evidence provided by others and gen-erate informative evidence that helps others learn. By studying social learning and teaching through a common theoretical lens, inferential social learning pro-vides an integrated account of how human cognition supports acquisition and communication of abstract knowledge.
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