ArticleScientific reports2017
Young children copy cumulative technological design in the absence of action information.
Article in Scientific reports, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Conditions under which faithful cultural transmission through teaching promotes cumulative cultural evolution.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Copying fidelity of functional and non-functional features in ni-Vanuatu children: A transmission chain studyPloS one · 2023Article
- The method of exclusion (still) cannot identify specific mechanisms of cultural inheritance.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Early knapping techniques do not necessitate cultural transmission.Science advances · 2022Article
- Field experiments find no evidence that chimpanzee nut cracking can be independently innovated.Nature human behaviour · 2022Article
- Human cumulative culture and the exploitation of natural phenomena.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- The value of teaching increases with tool complexity in cumulative cultural evolution.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- The evolution of high-fidelity social learning.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Examining the mechanisms underlying the acquisition of animal tool behaviour.Biology letters · 2020Article
- The zone of latent solutions and its relevance to understanding ape cultures.Biology & philosophy · 2020Article
- Testing the individual and social learning abilities of task-naïve captive chimpanzees (PeerJ · 2020Article
- Birch tar production does not prove Neanderthal behavioral complexity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Mental template matching is a potential cultural transmission mechanism for New Caledonian crow tool manufacturing traditions.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Cumulative culture in the laboratory: methodological and theoretical challenges.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Review
- Naive, captive long-tailed macaques (Royal Society open science · 2018Article
- Young children fail to generate an additive ratchet effect in an open-ended construction task.PloS one · 2018Article
- Innovation and social transmission in experimental micro-societies: exploring the scope of cumulative culture in young children.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Article
- Article
- Spontaneous reoccurrence of "scooping", a wild tool-use behaviour, in naïve chimpanzees.PeerJ · 2017Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The ratchet effect - the accumulation of beneficial changes in cultural products beyond a level that individuals could reach on their own - is a topic of increasing interest. It is currently debated which social learning mechanisms allow for the generation and transmission of cumulative culture. This study focused on transmission, investigating whether 4- to 6-year-old children were able to copy cumulative technological design and whether they could do so without action information (emulation). We adapted the spaghetti tower task, previously used to test for accumulation of culture in human adults. A baseline condition established that the demonstrated tower design was beyond the innovation skills of individual children this age and so represented a culture-dependent product for them. There were 2 demonstration conditions: a full demonstration (actions plus (end-)results) and an endstate- demonstration (end-results only). Children in both demonstration conditions built taller towers than those in the baseline. Crucially, in both demonstration conditions some children also copied the demonstrated tower. We provide the first evidence that young children learn from, and that some of them even copy, cumulative technological design, and that - in line with some adult studies - action information is not always necessary to transmit culture-dependent traits.
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