Journal
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 372, Issue 1735, Pages -Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2016.0425
Keywords
innovation; social learning; culture; cumulative culture; cultural evolution; tool use
Categories
Funding
- John Templeton Foundation [ID40128]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
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'.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available