Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution, School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St Andrews, South Street, St Andrews KY16 9JP, UK.
School of Life Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh EH14 4AS, UK.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2017 Dec 5;372(1735). doi: 10.1098/rstb.2016.0425.
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'.
累积文化和创新的实验研究是一门年轻的科学，儿童研究非常罕见，以至于儿童时期累积文化能力的范围在很大程度上仍是未知的。在这里，我们报告了一种新的实验方法，可以解决这些现象固有的复杂性。我们给 3-4 岁的儿童一组组复杂的挑战，让他们有机会通过各种技术逐渐获得更有吸引力的奖励，从而实现潜在的累积发展。与之前的一项研究不同，我们发现了基本形式的累积文化进步的证据，较低层次的解决方案的发明传播成为共享的创新，而一些孩子在此基础上进一步创造出更先进但更有回报的创新。相比之下，如果儿童仅靠自己工作，或者如果一开始就面临最高层次的挑战，那么进展则受到明显的限制。在进一步的实验中，通过引入年龄较大的儿童或引入具有更高层次的发明，或者通过引入生态变化，使得最简单的习惯性解决方案不再可能，从而鼓励了更高层次的累积创新。我们的结果表明，儿童不仅仅是“文化海绵”，而且在群体中表现出创新和观察学习的循环的开端，这种循环可以维持解决问题方面的累积进步。本文是主题为“从细胞到社会的创新过程和模式”的特刊的一部分。
