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.
Citation
Blakey , K H , Rafetseder , E , Atkinson , M , Renner , E , Cowan-Forsythe , F , Sati , S J & Caldwell , C A 2021 , ' Development of strategic social information seeking : implications for cumulative culture ' , PLoS ONE , vol. 16 , no. 8 , e0256605 . https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256605
Publication
PLoS ONE
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1932-6203Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright: © 2021 Blakey et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Description
KHB: PhD studentship funded by the Division of Psychology, University of Stirling. CAC: 648841 RATCHETCOG ERC-2014-CoG European Research Council https://erc.europa.eu/Collections
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