ArticlePloS one2018
Young children fail to generate an additive ratchet effect in an open-ended construction task.
Article in PloS one, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Copying fidelity of functional and non-functional features in ni-Vanuatu children: A transmission chain studyPloS one · 2023Article
- Technical reasoning bolsters cumulative technological culture through convergent transformations.Science advances · 2022Article
- Restricted Access to Working Memory Does Not Prevent Cumulative Score Improvement in a Cultural Evolution Task.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Human cumulative culture and the exploitation of natural phenomena.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- A New Look at Infant Problem-Solving: Using DeepLabCut to Investigate Exploratory Problem-Solving Approaches.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- The Pedagogue, the Engineer, and the Friend : From Whom Do We Learn?Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2020Article
- Motor constraints influence cultural evolution of rhythm.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Experimental assessment of capacities for cumulative culture: Review and evaluation of methods.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science · 2020Review
- Roles of Technical Reasoning, Theory of Mind, Creativity, and Fluid Cognition in Cumulative Technological Culture.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The ratchet effect-the gradual accumulation of changes within a cultural trait beyond a level that individuals can achieve on their own-arguably rests on two key cognitive abilities: high-fidelity social learning and innovation. Researchers have started to simulate the ratchet effect in the laboratory to identify its underlying social learning mechanisms, but studies on the developmental origins of the ratchet effect remain sparse. We used the transmission chain method and a tower construction task that had previously been used with adults to investigate whether "generations" of children between 4 and 6 years were able to make a technological product that individual children could not yet achieve. 21 children in a baseline and 80 children in transmission chains (each consisting of 10 successive children) were asked to build something as tall as possible from plasticine and sticks. Children in the chains were presented with the constructions of the two preceding generations (endstate demonstration). Results showed that tower heights did not increase across the chains nor were they different from the height of baseline towers, demonstrating a lack of improvement in tower height. However, we found evidence for cultural lineages, i.e., construction styles: towers within chains were more similar to each other than to towers from different chains. Possible explanations for the findings and directions for future research are suggested.
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Registered trials
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