ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2017
Innovation and social transmission in experimental micro-societies: exploring the scope of cumulative culture in young children.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Toddlers strategically adapt their information search.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Copying fidelity of functional and non-functional features in ni-Vanuatu children: A transmission chain studyPloS one · 2023Article
- The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Collective knowledge and the dynamics of culture in chimpanzees.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Chimpanzees' behavioral flexibility, social tolerance, and use of tool-composites in a progressively challenging foraging problem.iScience · 2021Article
- Experimental assessment of capacities for cumulative culture: Review and evaluation of methods.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science · 2020Review
- Where innovations flourish: an ethnographic and archaeological overview of hunter-gatherer learning contexts.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Review
- Cultural transmission in a food preparation task: The role of interactivity, innovation and storytelling.PloS one · 2019Article
- What is cumulative cultural evolution?Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Review
- Cumulative culture in the laboratory: methodological and theoretical challenges.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Review
- Young children fail to generate an additive ratchet effect in an open-ended construction task.PloS one · 2018Article
- Innovation: an emerging focus from cells to societies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Article
- The niche construction of cultural complexity: interactions between innovations, population size and the environment.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Article
- The conceptual foundations of network-based diffusion analysis: choosing networks and interpreting results.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
The experimental study of cumulative culture and the innovations essential to it is a young science, with child studies so rare that the scope of cumulative cultural capacities in childhood remains largely unknown. Here we report a new experimental approach to the inherent complexity of these phenomena. Groups of 3-4-year-old children were presented with an elaborate array of challenges affording the potential cumulative development of a variety of techniques to gain increasingly attractive rewards. In contrast to a prior study, we found evidence for elementary forms of cumulative cultural progress, with inventions of solutions at lower levels spreading to become shared innovations, and some children then building on these to create more advanced but more rewarding innovations. This contrasted with markedly more constrained progress when children worked only by themselves, or if groups faced only the highest-level challenges from the start. Further experiments that introduced higher-level inventions via the inclusion of older children, or that created ecological change, with the easiest habitual solutions no longer possible, encouraged higher levels of cumulative innovation. Our results show children are not merely 'cultural sponges', but when acting in groups, display the beginnings of cycles of innovation and observational learning that sustain cumulative progress in problem solving.This article is part of the themed issue 'Process and pattern in innovations from cells to societies'.
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