全部 标题 作者
关键词 摘要

OALib Journal期刊
ISSN: 2333-9721
费用:99美元

查看量下载量

相关文章

更多...
PLOS ONE  2012 

When the Transmission of Culture Is Child's Play

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0034066

Full-Text   Cite this paper   Add to My Lib

Abstract:

Background Humans frequently engage in arbitrary, conventional behavior whose primary purpose is to identify with cultural in-groups. The propensity for doing so is established early in human ontogeny as children become progressively enmeshed in their own cultural milieu. This is exemplified by their habitual replication of causally redundant actions shown to them by adults. Yet children seemingly ignore such actions shown to them by peers. How then does culture get transmitted intra-generationally? Here we suggest the answer might be ‘in play’. Principal Findings Using a diffusion chain design preschoolers first watched an adult retrieve a toy from a novel apparatus using a series of actions, some of which were obviously redundant. These children could then show another child how to open the apparatus, who in turn could show a third child. When the adult modeled the actions in a playful manner they were retained down to the third child at higher rates than when the adult seeded them in a functionally oriented way. Conclusions Our results draw attention to the possibility that play might serve a critical function in the transmission of human culture by providing a mechanism for arbitrary ideas to spread between children.

References

[1]  Lyons DE, Young AG, Keil FC (2007) The hidden structure of overimitation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 104: 19751–19756.
[2]  Nielsen M (2006) Copying actions and copying outcomes: Social learning through the second year. Developmental Psychology 42: 555–565.
[3]  Kenward B, Karlsson M, Persson J (2011) Over-imitation is better explained by norm learning than by distorted causal learning. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 278: 1239–1246.
[4]  Horner V, Whiten A (2005) Causal knowledge and imitation/emulation switching in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and children (Homo sapiens). Animal Cognition 8: 164–181.
[5]  Csibra G, Gergely G (2006) Social learning and social cognition: The case for pedagogy. In: Johnson MH, Munakata YM, editors. Processes of change in brain and cognitive development Attention and Performance, XXI. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 249–274.
[6]  Gergely G, Csibra G (2005) The social construction of the cultural mind: Imitative learning as a mechanism of human pedagogy. Interaction Studies 6: 463–481.
[7]  Schmidt M, Rakoczy H, Tomasello M (2011) Young children attribute normativity to novel actions without pedagogy or normative language. Developmental Science 14: 530–539.
[8]  McGuigan N, Graham M (2010) Cultural transmission of irrelevant tool actions in diffusion chains of 3- and 5-year-old children. European Journal of Developmental Psychology 7: 561–577.
[9]  Flynn E (2008) Investigating children as cultural magnets: do young children transmit redundant information along diffusion chains? Philosophical Transactions Of The Royal Society Of London B 363: 3541–3551.
[10]  Flynn E, Whiten A (2010) Studying children's social learning exerimentally “in the wild”. Learning & Behavior 38: 284–296.
[11]  Nielsen M, Tomaselli K (2010) Over-imitation in Kalahari Bushman children and the origins of human cultural cognition. Psychological Science 21: 729–736.
[12]  McGuigan N, Makinson J, Whiten A (2011) From over-imitation to super-copying: Adults imitate irrelevant aspects of tool use with higher fidelity than young children. British Journal of Psychology 102: 1–18.
[13]  Whiten A (2005) The second inheritance system of chimpanzees and humans. Nature 437: 52–55.
[14]  Tomasello M (1999) The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
[15]  Boyd R, Richerson PJ (1985) Culture and the evolutionary process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[16]  Cavalli-Sforza LL, Feldman MW (1981) Cultural transmission and evolution: A quantitative approach. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
[17]  Rakoczy H (2007) Play, games, and the development of collective intentionality. In: Kalish C, Sabbagh M, editors. Conventionality in cognitive development: How children acquire representations in language, thought and action New directions in child and adolescent development. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. pp. 53–67.
[18]  Searle JR (1995) The construction of social reality. New York: Free Press.
[19]  Leslie A (1987) Pretence and representation: The origins of “theory of mind”. Psychological Review 94: 412–426.
[20]  Perner J (1991) Understanding the representational mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
[21]  Harris PL, Kavanaugh RD (1993) Young children's understanding of pretence. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 58:
[22]  Lillard AS (1993) Young children's conceptualisation of pretence: Action or mental representational state? Child Development 64: 372–386.
[23]  Rakoczy H (2008) Pretence as individual and collective intentionality. Mind & Language 23: 499–517.
[24]  Nielsen M (in press) Imitation, pretend play and childhood: Essential elements in the evolution of human culture? Journal of Comparative Psychology.
[25]  Henrich J, Heine SJ, Norenzayan A (2010) The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 61–135.
[26]  Henrich J, Heine SJ, Norenzayan A (2010) Most people are not WEIRD. Nature 466: 29.
[27]  Haight WL, Wang X, Han-tih H, Williams K, Mintz J (1999) Universal, developmental, and variable aspects of young children's play: A cross-cultural comparison of pretending at home. Child Development 70: 1477–1488.
[28]  Smith PK (2010) Children and play. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
[29]  Nielsen M, Hudry K (2010) Over-imitation in children with Autism and Down syndrome. Australian Journal of Psychology 62: 67–74.
[30]  Whiten A, McGuigan N, Marshall-Pescini S, Hopper LM (2009) Emulation, imitation, over-imitation and the scope of culture for child and chimpanzee. Philosophical Transactions Of The Royal Society Of London B 364: 2417–2428.
[31]  Tennie C, Call J, Tomasello M (2009) Ratcheting up the ratchet: On the evolution of cumulative culture. Philosophical Transactions Of The Royal Society Of London B 364: 2405–2415.
[32]  Flynn E, Whiten A (2008) Cultural transmission of tool use in young children: A diffusion chain study. Social Development 17: 699–718.
[33]  Csibra G, Gergely G (2009) Natural pedagogy. Trends in Cognitive Science 13: 148–153.
[34]  Gergely G, Csibra G (2006) Sylvia's recipe: The role of imitation and pedagogy in the transmission of cultural knowledge. In: Levenson S, Enfield N, editors. Roots of human sociality: Culture, cognition, and human interaction. Oxford: Berg Publishers. pp. 229–255.
[35]  Gergely G, Egyed K, Kiraly I (2007) On pedagogy. Developmental Science 10: 139–146.
[36]  Zmyj N, Daum MM, Prinz W, Nielsen M, Aschersleben G (in press) Fourteen-month-olds' imitation of differently aged models. Infant and Child Development.
[37]  McGuigan N (in press) The role of transmission biases in the cultural diffusion of irrelevant actions. Journal of Comparative Psychology.
[38]  Vygotsky LS (1978) Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
[39]  Over H, Carpenter M (in press) Putting the social into social learning: Explaining both selectivity and fidelity in children's copying behavior. Journal of Comparative Psychology.
[40]  Nielsen M, Blank C (2011) Imitation in young children: When who gets copied is more important than what gets copied. Developmental Psychology 47: 1050–1053.
[41]  Kenward B (in press) Over-imitating preschoolers believe unnecessary actions are normative and enforce their performance by a third party. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.
[42]  Lyons DE, Damrosch DH, Lin JK, Macris DM, Keil FC (2011) The scope and limits of overimitation in the transmission of artefact culture. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 366: 1158–1167.
[43]  Nagell K, Olguin RS, Tomasello M (1993) Processes of social learning in the tool use of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and human children (Homo sapiens). Journal of Comparative Psychology 107: 174–186.
[44]  Carpenter M, Nielsen M (2008) Tools, TV and trust: Introduction to the special issue on imitation in typically developing children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 101: 225–227.
[45]  Rakoczy H, Tomasello M, Striano T (2005) How children turn objects into symbols: A cultural learning account. In: Namy L, editor. Symbol use and symbol representation. New York: Erlbaum. pp. 67–97.
[46]  Bretherton I, O'Connell B, Shore C, Bates E (1984) The effect of contextual variation on symbolic play: Development from 20 to 28 months. In: Bretherton I, editor. Symbolic play: The development of social understanding. New York: Academic Press. pp. 271–298.
[47]  McCune-Nicolich L (1981) Toward symbolic functioning: Structure of early pretend games and potential parallels with language. Child Development 52: 785–797.

Full-Text

Contact Us

service@oalib.com

QQ:3279437679

WhatsApp +8615387084133