McGuigan Nicola
Heriot Watt University, United Kingdom.
J Comp Psychol. 2012 May;126(2):150-60. doi: 10.1037/a0025525. Epub 2011 Sep 26.
This study used a diffusion chain paradigm to explore the cultural transmission of causally irrelevant tool actions in chains of adult participants. Each chain witnessed an "expert" adult retrieve a reward from inside a puzzle box using a combination of causally relevant actions and causally irrelevant actions. Which of the actions were causally relevant was evident in two of the chains where a transparent box was used. In the other two chains, the causal effectiveness of the tool was hidden inside an opaque version of the box. Results indicated that fewer of the irrelevant actions performed by the expert model were reproduced in the transparent box chains, than the opaque box chains. However, irrelevant actions, although not in their original form, were evident within each chain suggesting that causally irrelevant tool actions can survive within groups of adults. The current article places these results, alongside those from earlier overimitation studies, within a framework of cultural evolution. The proposal here is that the social learning of irrelevant actions is heavily influenced by the interaction between various transmission biases, including frequency-based biases, model-based biases, and content-based biases. It is further proposed that the transmission bias witnessed may differ according to the interplay between characteristics of the model, characteristics of the observer, and the contents of the task.
本研究采用扩散链范式，在成年参与者群体中探究因果无关工具动作的文化传播。每个群体都目睹一名“专家”成年人使用因果相关动作和因果无关动作的组合，从拼图盒中取出奖励。在使用透明盒子的两个群体中，哪些动作是因果相关的一目了然。在另外两个群体中，工具的因果效力被隐藏在不透明版本的盒子里。结果表明，与不透明盒子群体相比，专家模型执行的无关动作在透明盒子群体中被模仿的更少。然而，无关动作虽然不是以其原始形式出现，但在每个群体中都很明显，这表明因果无关的工具动作能够在成年人群体中留存。本文将这些结果与早期过度模仿研究的结果一起，置于文化进化的框架内。这里的提议是，无关动作的社会学习受到各种传播偏差之间相互作用的严重影响，这些偏差包括基于频率的偏差、基于模型的偏差和基于内容的偏差。进一步提出，所观察到的传播偏差可能会因模型特征、观察者特征和任务内容之间的相互作用而有所不同。
