Abstract
Increasing evidence suggests that ostensive-communicative signals in social learning situations enable observers to focus their attention on the intrinsic features of an object (e.g., color) at the expense of ignoring transient object properties (e.g., location). Here we investigated whether off-line social cues, presented as social primes, have the same power to modulate attention allocation to stable and transient object properties as on-line ostensive-communicative cues. The first part of the experiment consisted of a pre-treatment phase, where adult male participants either received intensive social stimulation or were asked to perform non-social actions. Then, they participated in a change detection test, where they watched pairs of pictures depicting an array of five objects. On the second picture, a change occurred compared to the first picture. One object changed either its location (moving forward or backward) or was replaced by another object, and participants were required to indicate where the change had happened. We found that participants detected the change more successfully if it had happened in the location of the object; however, this difference was reduced following a socially intense pre-treatment phase. The results are discussed in relation to the claims of the natural pedagogy theory.
Highlights
The human information processing system is constantly bombarded with an excess of stimuli, of which only a small portion can be effectively processed
The interaction between condition and change type was robustly significant [F(1,2946) = 31.906; p < 0.001] showing that while in both the Socially Stimulating and the Socially Ignoring pre-treatment groups, location change detection was easier than identity change detection, this difference was smaller in the Socially Stimulating pre-treatment group (Figure 3)
Using pairwise analyses (Least Significant Difference method, Generalized Linear Mixed Model (GLMM) post-hoc pairwise contrasts) we have found that the participants in the Socially Stimulating condition made more correct answers in the case of identity change than participants in the Socially Ignoring condition [t(2946) = 2.114; p = 0.035], while the opposite was true for location change [t(2946) = 2.409; p = 0.016] with less correct answers in the Socially Stimulating than in the Socially Ignoring condition
Summary
The human information processing system is constantly bombarded with an excess of stimuli, of which only a small portion can be effectively processed. The literature on selective attention mostly deals with low-level visual and acoustic processing, selectivity is vital in such cases, and has a fundamental role in social learning contexts. It has been well-established that human infants’ learning processes are driven to a great extent by observing the behavior of fellow humans and by copying their actions (e.g., Bandura, 1977; Nagell et al, 1993; Gergely and Csibra, 2006, etc.).
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