Social learning

Question 1

What is social learning?

Answer 1

• Presents knowledge already verified and ‘pre packaged’ through the accumulated experiences of others
• Powerful mechanism for fast and adaptive learning
• Such learning is less evolutionary costly for the
  individual than the relatively unconstrained, independent trial‐and‐error exploration

Question 2

what is the Rich vs lean view of social learning?

Answer 2

• “Rich”
  
  • Predisposition to learn from others
  • Hence, innate sensitivity to social cues, early imitation, understanding intentions of others
  • Cognition equipped for effective social learning due to domain specific evolutionary adaptations
• “Lean”
  
  • Happens through associative learning or cultural inheritance
  • Cognitive system quickly adapts through early learning experiences due to powerful domain-general mechanisms

Question 3

what are Social learning strategies?

Answer 3

• At the core of cultural transmission is the infant’s capacity to flexibly and effectively engage in a variety of social learning strategies:
  
  • Observation
  • Imitation - faithfully copying others’ actions
  • Information-seeking - faithfully copying others’
    unnecessary actions
  • Teaching

Question 4

what is Observation?

Answer 4

• Rapid nonverbal learning about causality without direct experience
• Third-party/absence of visible spatial contact
• The models do not have to be people that the child directly interacts with
• Widely present in non-human species

Question 5

Active information-seeking from others?

Answer 5

• Pointing to learn new words
• Asking questions to gain new knowledge, seek
  clarifications, explanations, elaborations
• Asking for help, problem-solving, demonstrations, to be taught

Question 6

Question-asking as information seeking in
social learning?

Answer 6

• “Passages of intellectual search” ~4 years
  
  • Extended bouts of questioning
  • Sustained curiosity on a single topic
  • Follow-up questions about explanations
  • Detecting inconsistencies in responses
  • Building up inquiry
  • Occurs with a responsive caregiver
  • Use questions to actively learn
• Resolving communicative breakdowns ~2,5-4 years
  
  • Unsuccessful conversation
  • Lack of mutual comprehension e.g., reaction to misnaming a familiar object: expressing doubt, disagreement, offering correction, seeking clarification

Question 7

what is Teaching?

Answer 7

• Behaviour that evolved to facilitate learning in less
  experienced by more experienced
• ‘Tutor’ modifies behaviour in presence of ‘pupil’
• Cost or no immediate benefit to ‘tutor’
• Evidence that ‘pupil’ learns useful skills or knowledge earlier or more efficiently
• Teaching in humans, as opposed to animals, is characterised by its flexibility, diversity, and domain generality
• Direct, intentional pedagogy facilitates acquisition of more complex knowledge and skills

Question 8

Natural Pedagogy Theory as a “rich” approach?

Answer 8

• Humans are uniquely predisposed to learn from social partners who use communicative cues
• Human communication is ostensive: it communicates not just the message to influence the recipient but also the very fact that this message is being intentionally communicated to her
• Early sensitivity to these cues indicates their readiness to learn and treat this information differently
• Ostension signals to infants that it is transmission of generic and generalizable knowledge
• Children are the beneficiaries of communication of generic knowledge: novices with respect to the accumulated knowledge

Question 9

what is Selectivity in social learning?

Answer 9

• Sensitivity to direct eye contact, child-directed speech
• Sensitivity to others’ cues of reliability, past accuracy, competence, confidence, credibility, personality
• Sensitivity to informants’ social characteristics: age, ingroup status, endorsement by others, deference to majority
• More likely to follow their gaze, socially reference them, imitate their actions, request labels for novel objects from them, retain novel words learned from
  them, reject information from previously inaccurate or ignorant informants

Question 10

what is Anticipation of learning - from best source?

Answer 10

• EEG theta waves time-frequency analysis during anticipation of learning period - more theta in anticipation of receiving labels for novel objects
• Infants expect to learn from best sources of information - more knowledgeable others

Question 11

does Pedagogy inhibit exploration?

Answer 11

• Interplay/competition between trust in others’ testimony and autonomous exploration
• Children actively seek additional evidence when they observe phenomena that are counter-intuitive or faced with confounded evidence
• But even when given an opportunity to explore
  independently, preschool age children prefer to endorse others judgment

Question 12

what is the “Double-edged sword of pedagogy”?

Answer 12

• Children selectively constrained their exploration
  following explicitly pedagogical demonstration
  
  • …possibly assuming that what has been explicitly
    demonstrated to them is:
    
    • the only function
    • preferred property
    • cultural norm/ “this is how we do it”

Question 13

what is the Trust in others’ testimony?

Answer 13

• Preschool children trust others’ counterintuitive testimony (smallest doll = heaviest), and continue to endorse it even after obtaining contradicting evidence from firsthand exploration

Question 14

what is the Developmental taxonomy of teaching strategies?

Answer 14

• Episodic information transmission: here-and-now information, such as pointing to a location of a hidden object, from 12 months
• Emergent teaching: generic and generalisable information, such as a label or a function of an object; contingency and selectivity, from preschool age
• Systematic contingent teaching: direct assistance, demonstration, explanation, and specific response to learners

Question 15

how are Children as selective teachers?

Answer 15

• Evaluate the nature of information before
  its transmission:
  
  • Obscure/complex
  • Generic vs specific
  • Normative vs descriptive
• Tailor their teaching demonstrations to observer’s goals and competence – from 4 y.o.

Question 16

Active social learning as a bi-directional process?

Answer 16

• Knowledge acquisition:
  
  • Information seeking
  • Exploration
  • Curiosity
• Knowledge transmission:
  
  • Information giving
  • Teaching
  • Pedagogy
• Active participation in cultural transmission from early childhood
• Epistemic and social sensitivity and selectivity in knowledge acquisition and transmission