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
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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