Journal
ROYAL SOCIETY OPEN SCIENCE
Volume 4, Issue 12, Pages -Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rsos.170367
Keywords
overimitation; innovation; tool-use; cross-cultural; sex differences; cumulative culture
Categories
Funding
- People Programme (Marie Curie Actions)
- European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development, and demonstration under REA [329197]
- Suor Orsola Benincasa University
- Swiss National Science Foundation [CR13I1_162720/1, P300PA_164678/1]
- Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) [CR13I1_162720, P300PA_164678] Funding Source: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF)
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Children are skilful at acquiring tool-using skills by faithfully copying relevant and irrelevant actions performed by others, but poor at innovating tools to solve problems. Five-to twelve-year-old urban French and rural Serbian children (N = 208) were exposed to a Hook task; a jar containing a reward in a bucket and a pipe cleaner as potential recovering tool material. In both countries, few children under the age of 10 made a hook from the pipe cleaner to retrieve the reward on their own. However, from five onward, the majority of unsuccessful children succeeded after seeing an adult model manufacturing a hook without completing the task. Additionally, a third of the children who observed a similar demonstration including an irrelevant action performed with a second object, a string, replicated this meaningless action. Children's difficulty with innovation and early capacity for overimitation thus do not depend on socio-economic background. Strikingly, we document a sex difference in overimitation across cultures, with boys engaging more in overimitation than girls, a finding that may result from differences regarding explorative tool-related behaviour. This male-biased sex effect sheds new light on our understanding of overimitation, and more generally, on how human tool culture evolved.
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