Social Learning Flashcards
(13 cards)
Social Learning
Presents knowledge already verified though the accumulated experiences of others
* Powerful mechanism for fast and adaptive learning
* Less evolutionary costly for the individual than the relatively uncontrained, independent, trial and error exploration
Rich Approach of Social Learning
- Predisposition to learn from others
- Innate sensitivity to social cues, early immitation, understaning other’s intentions, etc.
- Cognition equipped for effective social learning due to domain-specific evolutionary adaptations
- Invokes more complex reasoning and thinking strategies
Lean Approach to Social Learning
- Happens through associative learning or cultural inheritance
- Cognitive system quickly adapts though early learning experiences due to powerful domain-general mechanisms
Social Learning Strategies
Observation
- Rapid non-verbal learning about causality without direct experience
- Third party/absense of visual spatial contact
- Models do not have to be people that the child directly interacts with
- Widely present in non-human species
Social Learning Strategies
Imitation
- Faithfully copying others’ actions
- Faithfully copying others’ unnecessary actions
- Not necessary to achieve a goal
- Information transmitted though rituals
- Pervasiveness of over-imitation
- Even when could consciously explain that they knew they did not have to do over-imitative actions, they still copied all unnecessary actions
- Trust others to deliver knowledge
Social Learning Strategies
Information-Seeking
- Active intention to gain information
- Pointing to learn new word, asking questions to gain new knowledge
- Seeking help in order to solve problem
- E.g. Question asking as information seeking in social learning
- Resolving communicative breakdown (2.5-4 years): Unsuccessful conversation with lack of mutual comprehension
- Passage of intellectual search (4 years): Extended bouts of questioning and sustained curiosity on a single topic
Social Learning Strategies
Teaching
Behaviour that evolved to facilitate learning in less experienced by more experienced
* Tutor modifies behaviour in presense of ‘pupil’
* Model does actions in order to pass on knowledge that they would not normally do
* Evidence that pupil learns usefull skills or knowledge earlier and more efficiently
* Meerkats teach their pups how to catch prey by debilitating it and allowing their pups to do the last steps
* Teaching in humans is characterised by its flexibility, diversity, and domain-generality
Natural Pedagogy Theory as a Rich Approach
Humans are uniquely predisposed to learn from social partners who use communicative cues
* Human communication is oestensive
* Signals to infants that it is transmittion of generic and generalisable knowledge
* Children are the beneficiaries of communication of general knowledge
Pedagogical and Non-Pedagogical Action Demonstrations
Pedagogical
* No eye contact
* No child-directed speech
* Demonstrating an easy action
Non-Pedagogical
* Direct eye contact
* Child-directed speech
* Demonstrating a complex action
Selectivity in Social Learning
Sensitivity to Informative Cues in Others
- More theta waves in anticipation of receiving labels of novel objects
- Infants expect to learn from best sources of information (more knowledgable others)
Selectivity in Social Learning
Pedagogy May Inhibit Exploration
Interplay and 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
Selectivity in Social Learning
Double-Edged Sword of Pedagogy
Children selectively constrained their explanation following explicit pedagogical demonstration
* Toy had more functions that children were unwilling to explore further
* Possible assuming that what has been explicitly demonstrated to them is:
* The only function
* The preferred property
* Cultural norm
Knowledge Transmission Process
Developmental Taxonomy of Teaching Strategies
Episodic Information Transmission
* Here and now information
* From 12 months
Emergent Teaching
* Generic and generalisable information
* From 3-4 years
Systematic Contingent Teaching
* Direct assistance, demonstration, explanation, etc.
* From 4 years
