Journal
PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Volume 25, Issue 4, Pages 874-882Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC
DOI: 10.1177/0956797613516145
Keywords
learning; food; social cognition; evolutionary psychology; infant development
Categories
Funding
- NIMH NIH HHS [R01 MH 081877, R01 MH081877] Funding Source: Medline
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Recent research underscores the importance of social learning to the development of food preferences. Here, we explore whether social information about edibility-an adult placing something in his or her mouth-can be selectively tied to certain types of entities. Given that humans have relied on gathered plant resources across evolutionary time, and given the costs of trial-and-error learning, we predicted that human infants may possess selective social learning strategies that rapidly identify edible plants. Evidence from studies with 6- and 18-month-olds demonstrated that infants selectively identify plants, over artifacts, as food sources after seeing the same food-relevant social information applied to both object types. These findings are the first evidence for content-specific social learning mechanisms that facilitate the identification of edible plant resources. Evolved learning mechanisms such as these have enabled humans to survive and thrive in varied and changing environments.
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