Context-dependent model-based biases in cultural transmission: children's imitation is affected by model age over model knowledge state

Many animals, including humans, acquire information through social learning. Although such information can be acquired easily, its potential unreliability means it should not be used indiscriminately. Cultural ‘transmission biases’ may allow individuals to weigh their reliance on social information according to a model's characteristics. In one of the first studies to juxtapose two model-based biases, we investigated whether the age and knowledge state of a model affected the fidelity of children's copying. Eighty-five 5-year-old children watched a video demonstration of either an adult or child, who had professed either knowledge or ignorance regarding a tool-use task, extracting a reward from that task using both causally relevant and irrelevant actions. Relevant actions were imitated faithfully by children regardless of the model's characteristics, but children who observed an adult reproduced more irrelevant actions than those who observed a child. The professed knowledge state of the model showed a weaker effect on imitation of irrelevant actions. Overall, children favored the use of a ‘copy adults’ bias over a ‘copy task-knowledgeable individual’ bias, even though the latter could potentially have provided more reliable information. The use of such social learning strategies has significant implications for understanding the phenomenon of imitation of irrelevant actions (overimitation), instances of maladaptive information cascades, and cumulative culture.     

Membranous glomerulonephritis: rapidly fatal course.

Adolescence is a time of life marked by emotional turbulence and turmoil, which creates problems for the adolescent, his family and society in general. The psychological development that occurs during this period can be organized into developmental tasks, which emphasize the purposefulness of adolescence. An awareness of the nine essential tasks of development can serve as a basis for assessing the appropriateness and the developmental level of adolescent behavior. The establishment of a realistic self-concept (identity) is the most basic task of adolescence. Behavioral experimentation, the process through which much of the emotional growth of adolescence occurs, also accounts for the majority of the paradoxical and perplexing actions that typify the adolescent.To be in a better position to understand today''s teenagers, the physician should not judge normality or abnormality by adult standards, but should view adolescence in reference to its own processes and purposes.     

The scope and limits of overimitation in the transmission of artefact culture

Children are generally masterful imitators, both rational and flexible in their reproduction of others'' actions. After observing an adult operating an unfamiliar object, however, young children will frequently overimitate, reproducing not only the actions that were causally necessary but also those that were clearly superfluous. Why does overimitation occur? We argue that when children observe an adult intentionally acting on a novel object, they may automatically encode all of the adult''s actions as causally meaningful. This process of automatic causal encoding (ACE) would generally guide children to accurate beliefs about even highly opaque objects. In situations where some of an adult''s intentional actions were unnecessary, however, it would also lead to persistent overimitation. Here, we undertake a thorough examination of the ACE hypothesis, reviewing prior evidence and offering three new experiments to further test the theory. We show that children will persist in overimitating even when doing so is costly (underscoring the involuntary nature of the effect), but also that the effect is constrained by intentionality in a manner consistent with its posited learning function. Overimitation may illuminate not only the structure of children''s causal understanding, but also the social learning processes that support our species'' artefact-centric culture.     

Making Smart Social Judgments Takes Time: Infants' Recruitment of Goal Information When Generating Action Predictions

Previous research has shown that young infants perceive others'' actions as structured by goals. One open question is whether the recruitment of this understanding when predicting others'' actions imposes a cognitive challenge for young infants. The current study explored infants'' ability to utilize their knowledge of others'' goals to rapidly predict future behavior in complex social environments and distinguish goal-directed actions from other kinds of movements. Fifteen-month-olds (N = 40) viewed videos of an actor engaged in either a goal-directed (grasping) or an ambiguous (brushing the back of her hand) action on a Tobii eye-tracker. At test, critical elements of the scene were changed and infants'' predictive fixations were examined to determine whether they relied on goal information to anticipate the actor''s future behavior. Results revealed that infants reliably generated goal-based visual predictions for the grasping action, but not for the back-of-hand behavior. Moreover, response latencies were longer for goal-based predictions than for location-based predictions, suggesting that goal-based predictions are cognitively taxing. Analyses of areas of interest indicated that heightened attention to the overall scene, as opposed to specific patterns of attention, was the critical indicator of successful judgments regarding an actor''s future goal-directed behavior. These findings shed light on the processes that support “smart” social behavior in infants, as it may be a challenge for young infants to use information about others'' intentions to inform rapid predictions.     

Is the Cultural Transmission of Irrelevant Tool Actions in Adult Humans (Homo Sapiens) Best Explained as the Result of an Evolved Conformist Bias?

Background

Recent studies of social learning have revealed that adult humans are “over-imitators” who frequently reproduce a model''s causally irrelevant tool actions to the detriment of task efficiency. At present our knowledge of adult over-imitation is limited to the fact that adults do over-imitate, we know very little about the causes of this behavior. The current study aimed to provide novel insights into adult over-imitation by extending a paradigm recently used with human children to explore social aspects of over-imitation. In the child study observers saw two models demonstrate a tool-use task using the same inefficient approach, or two models demonstrate different approaches to the task (one inefficient and one efficient). The manipulation of social influence came in the testing phase where the observer completed the task in the presence of either an inefficient model or an efficient model.

Methodology/Principal Findings

We adapted the paradigm used in the child study to provide the first systematic exploration of factors which may lead to adult over-imitation including: 1) the presence of the model(s) during testing, 2) the presence of a competing efficient task demonstration, 3) the presence of a majority displaying the inefficient approach, and 4) the ‘removal’ of the experimental context during task completion. We show that the adult participants only over-imitated in conditions where the inefficient strategy was the majority approach witnessed. This tendency towards over-imitation was almost entirely eliminated when the participants interacted with the task when they believed the experiment to be complete.

Conclusions

Our results suggest that adult over-imitation is best explained as a result of an evolved ‘conformist bias’ argued to be crucial to the transmission of human cultural behavior and one which may be unique in the animal kingdom.     

Fairness Norms and Theory of Mind in an Ultimatum Game: Judgments,Offers, and Decisions in School-Aged Children

The sensitivity to fairness undergoes relevant changes across development. Whether such changes depend on primary inequity aversion or on sensitivity to a social norm of fairness is still debated. Using a modified version of the Ultimatum Game that creates informational asymmetries between Proposer and Responder, a previous study showed that both perceptions of fairness and fair behavior depend upon normative expectations, i.e., beliefs about what others expect one should do in a specific situation. Individuals tend to comply with the norm when risking sanctions, but disregard the norm when violations are undetectable. Using the same methodology with children aged 8–10 years, the present study shows that children''s beliefs and behaviors differ from what is observed in adults. Playing as Proposers, children show a self-serving bias only when there is a clear informational asymmetry. Playing as Responders, they show a remarkable discrepancy between their normative judgment about fair procedures (a coin toss to determine the offer) and their behavior (rejection of an unfair offer derived from the coin toss), supporting the existence of an outcome bias effect. Finally, our results reveal no influence of theory of mind on children''s decision-making behavior.     

Why Do Child-Directed Interactions Support Imitative Learning in Young Children?

Child-directed cues support imitation of novel actions at 18 months, but not at two years of age. The current studies explore the mechanisms that underlie the propensity that children have to copy others at 18 months, and how the value of child-directed communication changes over development. We ask if attentional allocation accounts for children''s failure to imitate observed actions at 18 months, and their success at two years of age, and we explore the informational value child-directed contexts may provide across ontogeny. Eighteen-month-old (Study 1) and two-year-old (Study 2) children viewed causally non-obvious actions performed by child-directed (Study 1 & 2), observed (Study 1 & 2), or non-interactive (Study 2) actors, and their visual attention and imitative behaviors were assessed. Results demonstrated that child-directed contexts supported imitative learning for 18-month-old children, independent of their effects on proximal attention. However, by two years of age, neither directness nor communication between social partners was a necessary condition for supporting social imitation. These findings suggest that developmental changes in children''s propensity to extract information from observation cannot be accounted for by changes in children''s interpretation of what counts as child-directed information, and are likely not due to changes in how children allocate attention to observed events.     

Leadership in Moving Human Groups

How is movement of individuals coordinated as a group? This is a fundamental question of social behaviour, encompassing phenomena such as bird flocking, fish schooling, and the innumerable activities in human groups that require people to synchronise their actions. We have developed an experimental paradigm, the HoneyComb computer-based multi-client game, to empirically investigate human movement coordination and leadership. Using economic games as a model, we set monetary incentives to motivate players on a virtual playfield to reach goals via players'' movements. We asked whether (I) humans coordinate their movements when information is limited to an individual group member''s observation of adjacent group member motion, (II) whether an informed group minority can lead an uninformed group majority to the minority''s goal, and if so, (III) how this minority exerts its influence. We showed that in a human group – on the basis of movement alone – a minority can successfully lead a majority. Minorities lead successfully when (a) their members choose similar initial steps towards their goal field and (b) they are among the first in the whole group to make a move. Using our approach, we empirically demonstrate that the rules of swarming behaviour apply to humans. Even complex human behaviour, such as leadership and directed group movement, follow simple rules that are based on visual perception of local movement.     

When Age Matters: Differences in Facial Mimicry and Autonomic Responses to Peers' Emotions in Teenagers and Adults

Age-group membership effects on explicit emotional facial expressions recognition have been widely demonstrated. In this study we investigated whether Age-group membership could also affect implicit physiological responses, as facial mimicry and autonomic regulation, to observation of emotional facial expressions. To this aim, facial Electromyography (EMG) and Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA) were recorded from teenager and adult participants during the observation of facial expressions performed by teenager and adult models. Results highlighted that teenagers exhibited greater facial EMG responses to peers'' facial expressions, whereas adults showed higher RSA-responses to adult facial expressions. The different physiological modalities through which young and adults respond to peers'' emotional expressions are likely to reflect two different ways to engage in social interactions with coetaneous. Findings confirmed that age is an important and powerful social feature that modulates interpersonal interactions by influencing low-level physiological responses.     

Predicting child abuse: signs of bonding failure in the maternity hospital.

Fifty children referred to the Park Hospital because of actual or threatened abuse were compared with 50 controls born at the same maternity hospital. Five factors were significantly more common in the abused group than among their controls: (a) mother aged under 20 at birth of first child, (b) evidence of emotional disturbance, (c) referral of family to hospital social worker, (d) baby''s admission to special care baby unit, (e) recorded concern over the mother''s ability to care for child. Thirty-five of the abused group had two or more of these factors compared with only five of the control group. As these data were collected from information recorded routinely at the maternity hospital, it is possible to identify most abusing families when the child is born. Such identification must lead to a comprehensive assessment of each case followed by constructive preventive action.     

Visual and socio-cognitive information processing in primate brain evolution.

Social group size has been shown to correlate with neocortex size in primates. Here we use comparative analyses to show that social group size is independently correlated with the size of non-V1 neocortical areas, but not with other more proximate components of the visual system or with brain systems associated with emotional cueing (e.g. the amygdala). We argue that visual brain components serve as a social information ''input device'' for socio-visual stimuli such as facial expressions, bodily gestures and visual status markers, while the non-visual neocortex serves as a ''processing device'' whereby these social cues are encoded, interpreted and associated with stored information. However, the second appears to have greater overall importance because the size of the V1 visual area appears to reach an asymptotic size beyond which visual acuity and pattern recognition may not improve significantly. This is especially true of the great ape clade (including humans), that is known to use more sophisticated social cognitive strategies.     

Coevolution of honest signaling and cooperative norms by cultural group selection

Evolution of cooperative norms is studied in a population where individual and group level selection are both in operation. Individuals play indirect reciprocity game within their group and follow second order norms. Individuals are norm-followers, and imitate their successful group mates. Aside from direct observation individuals can be informed about the previous actions and reputations by information transferred by others. A potential donor estimates the reputation of a potential receiver either by her own observation or by the opinion of the majority of others (indirect observation). Following a previous study (Scheuring, 2009) we assume that norms determine only the probabilities of actions, and mutants can differ in these probabilities. Similarly, we assume that individuals follow a stochastic information transfer strategy. The central question is whether cooperative norm and honest social information transfer can emerge in a population where initially only non-cooperative norms were present, and the transferred information was not sufficiently honest.It is shown that evolution can lead to a cooperative state where information transferred in a reliable manner, where generous cooperative strategies are dominant. This cooperative state emerges along a sharp transition of norms. We studied the characteristics of actions and strategies in this transition by classifying the stochastic norms, and found that a series of more and more judging strategies invade each other before the stabilization of the so-called generous judging strategy. Numerical experiments on the coevolution of social parameters (e.g. probability of direct observation and the number of indirect observers) reveal that it is advantageous to lean on indirect observation even if information transfer is much noisier than for direct observation, which is because to follow the majorities’ opinion suppresses information noise meaningfully.     

Fathers' and Mothers' Home Literacy Involvement and Children's Cognitive and Social Emotional Development: Implications for Family Literacy Programs

The relations between fathers' and mothers' home literacy involvement at 24 months and children's cognitive and social emotional development in preschool were examined using a large sample of African American and Caucasian families (N = 5190) from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B). Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that both fathers' and mothers' home literacy involvement positively contributed to children's cognitive and social emotional development. Specifically, fathers and mothers who participated in more frequent home literacy involvement (e.g., shared book reading) had children with better reading, math, and social emotional outcomes (i.e., sustained attention and fewer negative behaviors) in preschool. Findings suggest that increasing family literacy involvement can have positive benefits for children's cognitive and social emotional skills during the developmentally important early childhood years.     

The face is not an empty canvas: how facial expressions interact with facial appearance

Faces are not simply blank canvases upon which facial expressions write their emotional messages. In fact, facial appearance and facial movement are both important social signalling systems in their own right. We here provide multiple lines of evidence for the notion that the social signals derived from facial appearance on the one hand and facial movement on the other interact in a complex manner, sometimes reinforcing and sometimes contradicting one another. Faces provide information on who a person is. Sex, age, ethnicity, personality and other characteristics that can define a person and the social group the person belongs to can all be derived from the face alone. The present article argues that faces interact with the perception of emotion expressions because this information informs a decoder''s expectations regarding an expresser''s probable emotional reactions. Facial appearance also interacts more directly with the interpretation of facial movement because some of the features that are used to derive personality or sex information are also features that closely resemble certain emotional expressions, thereby enhancing or diluting the perceived strength of particular expressions.     

“Gift Giving” by Wild Bottle nose Dolphins (Tursiops sp.) to Humans at a Wild Dolphin Provisioning Program,Tangalooma, Australia

ABSTRACT

While there is increasing interest in the impact of animal interactions upon children's wellbeing and attitudes, there has been less attention paid to the specific characteristics of the animals that attract and engage children. We used a within-subjects design to explore how differences in animal features (such as their animacy, size, and texture) impacted upon pre-school children's social and emotional responses. This study examined pre-schoolers' interactions with two animal-like robots (Teksta and Scoozie), two insect types (stick insects and hissing cockroaches) and a dog (Teasel, a West Highland Terrier). Nineteen preschool participants aged 35–57 months were videoed while interacting with the experimenter, a peer, and each stimulus (presented individually). We used both verbal and nonverbal behaviors to evaluate interactions and emotional responses to the stimuli and found that these two measures could be incongruent, highlighting the need for systematic approaches to evaluating children's interactions with animals. We categorized the content of children's dialogues in relation to psychological and biological attributes of each stimulus and their distinctions between living and non-living stimuli; the majority of comments were biological, with psychological terms largely reserved for the dog and mammal-like robot only. Comments relating to living qualities revealed ambiguity towards attributes that denote differences between living and non-living creatures. We used a range of nonverbal measures, including willingness to approach and touch stimuli, rates of self-touching, facial expressions of emotion, and touch to others. Insects (hissing cockroaches and stick insects) received the most negative verbal and nonverbal responses. The mammal-like robot (rounded, fluffy body shape, large eyes, and sympathetic sounds) was viewed much more positively than its metallic counterpart, as was the real dog. We propose that these interactions provide information on how children perceive animals and a platform for the examination of human socio-emotional and cognitive development more generally. The children engaged in social referencing to the adult experimenter rather than familiar peers when uncertain about the stimuli presented, suggesting that caregivers have a primary role in shaping children's responses to animals.     

Does the Majority Always Know Best? Young Children's Flexible Trust in Majority Opinion

Copying the majority is generally an adaptive social learning strategy but the majority does not always know best. Previous work has demonstrated young children''s selective uptake of information from a consensus over a lone dissenter. The current study examined children''s flexibility in following the majority: do they overextend their reliance on this heuristic to situations where the dissenting individual has privileged knowledge and should be trusted instead? Four- to six- year-olds (N = 103) heard conflicting claims about the identity of hidden drawings from a majority and a dissenter in two between-subject conditions: in one, the dissenter had privileged knowledge over the majority (he drew the pictures); in the other he did not (they were drawn by an absent third party). Overall, children were less likely to trust the majority in the Privileged Dissenter condition. Moreover, 5- and 6- year-olds made majority-based inferences when the dissenter had no privileged knowledge but systematically endorsed the dissenter when he drew the pictures. The current findings suggest that by 5 years, children are able to make an epistemic-based judgment to decide whether or not to follow the majority rather than automatically following the most common view.     

The pathogenesis of autism: insights from congenital blindness

There is substantial heterogeneity in the aetiology and clinical presentation of autism. So how do we account for homogeneity in the syndrome? The answer to this question will be critical for any attempt to trace the links between brain pathology and the psychological disabilities that characterize autism. One possibility is that the source of homogeneity in autism is not to be found ''in the child'', but rather in dysfunction of the system constituted by child-in-relation-to-other. We have been exploring this hypothesis through the study of congenitally blind children, among whom features of autism, and the syndrome of autism itself, are strikingly common. To justify such an approach, one needs to establish that the clinical features in blind children have qualities that are indeed ''autistic-like''. We conducted systematic observations of the social interactions of two matched groups of congenitally blind children who do not have autism, rating their social engagement, emotional tone, play and language during three sessions of free play in the school playground. The qualities of social impairment in the more disabled children were similar to those in sighted children with autism. Additional evidence came from independent ratings of the children in a different play setting: on the childhood autism rating scale (CARS), the socially impaired children had ''autistic-like'' abnormalities in both social and non-social domains. If we can determine the way in which congenital blindness predisposes to features of autism, we shall be in a better position to trace the developmental pathways that lead to the syndrome in sighted children.     

Exploring the Relation of Harsh Parental Discipline with Child Emotional and Behavioral Problems by Using Multiple Informants. The Generation R Study

Parental harsh disciplining, like corporal punishment, has consistently been associated with adverse mental health outcomes in children. It remains a challenge to accurately assess the consequences of harsh discipline, as researchers and clinicians generally rely on parent report of young children''s problem behaviors. If parents rate their parenting styles and their child''s behavior this may bias results. The use of child self-report on problem behaviors is not common but may provide extra information about the relation of harsh parental discipline and problem behavior. We examined the independent contribution of young children''s self-report above parental report of emotional and behavioral problems in a study of maternal and paternal harsh discipline in a birth cohort. Maternal and paternal harsh discipline predicted both parent reported behavioral and parent reported emotional problems, but only child reported behavioral problems. Associations were not explained by pre-existing behavioral problems at age 3. Importantly, the association with child reported outcomes was independent from parent reported problem behavior. These results suggest that young children''s self-reports of behavioral problems provide unique information on the effects of harsh parental discipline. Inclusion of child self-reports can therefore help estimate the effects of harsh parental discipline more accurately.     

Dogs' Social Referencing towards Owners and Strangers

Social referencing is a process whereby an individual uses the emotional information provided by an informant about a novel object/stimulus to guide his/her own future behaviour towards it. In this study adult dogs were tested in a social referencing paradigm involving a potentially scary object with either their owner or a stranger acting as the informant and delivering either a positive or negative emotional message. The aim was to evaluate the influence of the informant''s identity on the dogs'' referential looking behaviour and behavioural regulation when the message was delivered using only vocal and facial emotional expressions. Results show that most dogs looked referentially at the informant, regardless of his/her identity. Furthermore, when the owner acted as the informant dogs that received a positive emotional message changed their behaviour, looking at him/her more often and spending more time approaching the object and close to it; conversely, dogs that were given a negative message took longer to approach the object and to interact with it. Fewer differences in the dog''s behaviour emerged when the informant was the stranger, suggesting that the dog-informant relationship may influence the dog''s behavioural regulation. Results are discussed in relation to studies on human-dog communication, attachment, mood modification and joint attention.