Young children copy cumulative technological design in the absence of action information

Reindl, Eva and Apperly, Ian and Beck, Sarah Ruth and Tennie, Claudio (2017). Young children copy cumulative technological design in the absence of action information. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-852706

The focus of the project was on the ontogenetic origins of cumulative culture within the technical domain. It identified a suitable technical task for studying children's learning in a cumulative cultural context and examined the necessary underlying transmission mechanisms (actions, results or both) for children to copy culture-dependent traits. It also investigated whether young children are already able to produce a ratchet effect.

Data description (abstract)

The data are gained from a behavioural experiment, for which we adapted the spaghetti tower task, a task that was previously used to test for accumulation of culture in human adults. Studies based on this dataset investigated whether 4- to 6-year-old children were able to copy cumulative technological design and whether they could do so without action information (emulation learning). It is currently debated which social learning mechanisms allow for the generation and transmission of cumulative culture, i.e., cultural traits that no individual could have invented on his/her own but which have accumulated through individuals learning from each other.A baseline condition established that the demonstrated tower design was beyond the innovation skills of individual children this age and so represented a culture-dependent product for them. There were 2 demonstration conditions: a full demonstration (actions plus (end-)results) and an end state- demonstration (end-results only). Children in both demonstration conditions built taller towers than those in the baseline. Crucially, in both demonstration conditions some children also copied the demonstrated tower. The data provide the first evidence that young children learn from, and that some of them even copy, cumulative technological design, and that – in line with some adult studies – action information is not always necessary to transmit culture-dependent traits.

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