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.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Article number | e0256605 |
Number of pages | 22 |
Journal | PLoS ONE |
Volume | 16 |
Issue number | 8 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 24 Aug 2021 |
Fingerprint
Dive into the research topics of 'Development of strategic social information seeking: implications for cumulative culture'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Datasets
-
Development of strategic social learning in 3- to 8-year-old children
Blakey, K. H. (Creator), Rafetseder, E. (Creator), Atkinson, M. (Creator), Renner, E. (Creator) & Caldwell, C. (Creator), OSF, 29 Jul 2021
Dataset