Investigating children as cultural magnets: do young children transmit redundant information along diffusion chains? - PubMed (original) (raw)

Comparative Study

Investigating children as cultural magnets: do young children transmit redundant information along diffusion chains?

Emma Flynn. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2008.

Abstract

The primary goal of this study was to investigate cultural transmission in young children, with specific reference to the phenomenon of overimitation. Diffusion chains were used to compare the imitation of 2- and 3-year-olds on a task in which the initial child in each chain performed a series of relevant and irrelevant actions on a puzzle box in order to retrieve a reward. Children in the chains witnessed the actions performed on one of two boxes, one which was transparent and so the lack of causality of the irrelevant actions was obvious, while the other was opaque and so the lack of causal relevance was not obvious. Unlike previous dyadic research in which children overimitate a model, the irrelevant actions were parsed out early in the diffusion chains. Even though children parsed out irrelevant actions, they showed fidelity to the method used to perform a relevant action both within dyads and across groups. This was true of 3-year-olds, and also 2-year-olds, therefore extending findings from previous research.

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Figures

Figure 1

Figure 1

The two glass ceiling boxes: (a) the transparent box with the tool being tapped in the upper compartment and (b) the opaque box with the door in the lift position and the tool inserted into the opaque tube that contains the reward.

Figure 2

Figure 2

Transmission along diffusion chains. Each row of seven bracketed symbols represents a child's attempt on a GCB. The upper two rows of each set of four are attempts and the lower two rows are demonstrations: (db) represents dragging the bolts, (pb) represents pushing the bolts, (hp) represents poking and pulling the bolts with one's hand, (tb) refers to children who touched the bolts but did not move them, (t) represents tapping into the upper compartment (the initial demonstrator did this three times, only the first three taps are illustrated although some children made more), (LD) represents lifting the door open, (SDL) or (SDR) represent sliding the door open either towards the left or right, (tu) refers to children who used the tool rather than their hand to move the door, sometimes children moved the door more than once (e.g. ×20 means moving the door 20 times) and (RR) represents retrieving the reward. A symbol that does not appear means that the behaviour it represents was not produced during that attempt. A black rectangle to the side of a chain represents a child who was allocated to a chain but did not participate in the chain. Actions represented with uppercase letters are causally necessary actions, while actions represented with lowercase letters were not causally necessary.

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