Adaptive cultural transmission biases in children and nonhuman primates
Abstract
Comparative and evolutionary developmental analyses seek to discover the similarities and differences between humans and non-human species that might illuminate both the evolutionary foundations of our nature that we share with other animals, and the distinctive characteristics that make human development unique. As our closest animal relatives, with whom we last shared common ancestry, non-human primates have been particularly important in this endeavour. Such studies have focused on social learning, traditions, and culture, and have discovered much about the ‘how’ of social learning, concerned with key underlying processes such as imitation and emulation. One of the core discoveries is that the adaptive adjustment of social learning options to different contexts is not unique to human, therefore multiple new strands of research have begun to focus on more subtle questions about when, from whom, and why such learning occurs. Here we review illustrative studies on both human infants and young children and on non-human primates to identify the similarities shared more broadly across the primate order, and the apparent specialisms that distinguish human development. Adaptive biases in social learning discussed include those modulated by task comprehension, experience, conformity to majorities, and the age, skill, proficiency and familiarity of potential alternative cultural models.
Citation
Price , E E , Wood , L A & Whiten , A 2017 , ' Adaptive cultural transmission biases in children and nonhuman primates ' , Infant Behavior and Development , vol. 48 , no. Part A , pp. 45-53 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2016.11.003
Publication
Infant Behavior and Development
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0163-6383Type
Journal item
Rights
Crown Copyright © 2016 Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. This work has been made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2016.11.003
Description
AW and LW were supported by grant ID 40128 from the John Templeton Foundation during the writing of this review.Collections
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