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Development of strategic social information seeking: Implications for cumulative culture.

ABSTRACT: Human learners are rarely the passive recipients of valuable social information. Rather, learners usually have to actively seek out information from a variety of potential others to determine who is in a position to provide useful information. Yet, the majority of developmental social learning paradigms do not address participants' ability to seek out information for themselves. To investigate age-related changes in children's ability to seek out appropriate social information, 3- to 8-year-olds (N = 218) were presented with a task requiring them to identify which of four possible demonstrators could provide critical information for unlocking a box. Appropriate information seeking improved significantly with age. The particularly high performance of 7- and 8-year-olds was consistent with the expectation that older children's increased metacognitive understanding would allow them to identify appropriate information sources. Appropriate social information seeking may have been overlooked as a significant cognitive challenge involved in fully benefiting from others' knowledge, potentially influencing understanding of the phylogenetic distribution of cumulative culture.

SUBMITTER: Blakey KH

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8384161 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Cumulative culture underpins humanity's enormous success as a species. Claims that other animals are incapable of cultural ratcheting are prevalent, but are founded on just a handful of empirical studies. Whether cumulative culture is unique to humans thus remains a controversial and understudied question that has far-reaching implications for our understanding of the evolution of this phenomenon. We investigated whether one of human's two closest living primate relatives, chimpanzees, are capable of a degree of cultural ratcheting by exposing captive populations to a novel juice extraction task. We found that groups (N = 3) seeded with a model trained to perform a tool modification that built upon simpler, unmodified tool use developed the seeded tool method that allowed greater juice returns than achieved by groups not exposed to a trained model (non-seeded controls; N = 3). One non-seeded group also discovered the behavioral sequence, either by coupling asocial and social learning or by repeated invention. This behavioral sequence was found to be beyond what an additional control sample of chimpanzees (N = 1 group) could discover for themselves without a competent model and lacking experience with simpler, unmodified tool behaviors. Five chimpanzees tested individually with no social information, but with experience of simple unmodified tool use, invented part, but not all, of the behavioral sequence. Our findings indicate that (i) social learning facilitated the propagation of the model-demonstrated tool modification technique, (ii) experience with simple tool behaviors may facilitate individual discovery of more complex tool manipulations, and (iii) a subset of individuals were capable of learning relatively complex behaviors either by learning asocially and socially or by repeated invention over time. That chimpanzees learn increasingly complex behaviors through social and asocial learning suggests that humans' extraordinary ability to do so was built on such prior foundations.

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Development of strategic social information seeking: Implications for cumulative culture.

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