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.
Highlights
Seeking out relevant information from appropriate social sources is ubiquitous in human adults
The two key aims of this study were to examine whether children were able to seek out and select the target demonstration video and, if successful, whether they were able to use the social information in the demonstration to select the target key to unlock the padlock
In this study we investigated the development of appropriate social information seeking in 3to 8-year-olds
Summary
Seeking out relevant information from appropriate social sources is ubiquitous in human adults. Human adults may demonstrate key differences in the way they seek, attend to, and use social information compared to children and non-human animals ( animals). This propensity for identifying and gathering relevant social information has been proposed as one of a suite of cognitive mechanisms that may be required for distinctively human cumulative culture [1,2,3]. Its rarity in animals and apparent importance in accounting for human evolutionary success has prompted interest regarding the emergence and development of cognitive mechanisms in human children that support.
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