Psychology Department, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK.
School of Psychology, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK.
Dev Sci. 2020 Sep;23(5):e12941. doi: 10.1111/desc.12941. Epub 2020 Feb 13.
Children are sensitive to both social and non-social aspects of the learning environment. Among social cues, pedagogical communication has been shown to not only play a role in children's learning, but also in their own active transmission of knowledge. Vredenburgh, Kushnir and Casasola, Developmental Science, 2015, 18, 645 showed that 2-year-olds are more likely to demonstrate an action to a naive adult after learning it in a pedagogical than in a non-pedagogical context. This finding was interpreted as evidence that pedagogically transmitted information has a special status as culturally relevant. Here we test the limits of this claim by setting it in contrast with an explanation in which the relevance of information is the outcome of multiple interacting social (e.g., pedagogical demonstration) and non-social properties (e.g., action complexity). To test these competing hypotheses, we varied both pedagogical cues and action complexity in an information transmission paradigm with 2-year-old children. In Experiment 1, children preferentially transmitted simple non-pedagogically demonstrated actions over pedagogically demonstrated more complex actions. In Experiment 2, when both actions were matched for complexity, we found no evidence of preferential transmission of pedagogically demonstrated actions. We discuss possible reasons for the discrepancy between our results and previous literature showing an effect of pedagogical cues on cultural transmission, and conclude that our results are compatible with the view that pedagogical and other cues interact, but incompatible with the theory of a privileged role for pedagogical cues.
儿童对学习环境中的社会和非社会方面都很敏感。在社会线索中，教学交流不仅在儿童的学习中发挥作用，而且在他们自己主动传播知识方面也发挥作用。Vredenburgh、Kushnir 和 Casasola 在《发展科学》2015 年第 18 卷中表明，2 岁的儿童在教学环境中学习后，比在非教学环境中更有可能向天真的成年人展示一个动作。这一发现被解释为教学传递的信息具有特殊的文化相关性的证据。在这里，我们通过将其与一种解释进行对比来检验这一说法的局限性，这种解释认为信息的相关性是多种相互作用的社会（例如，教学示范）和非社会属性（例如，动作复杂性）的结果。为了检验这些相互竞争的假设，我们在一个信息传递范式中改变了教学线索和动作复杂性，以 2 岁的儿童为研究对象。在实验 1 中，儿童优先传递简单的非教学示范动作，而不是教学示范的更复杂动作。在实验 2 中，当两个动作的复杂性相匹配时，我们没有发现教学示范动作优先传递的证据。我们讨论了我们的结果与之前表明教学线索对文化传播有影响的文献之间存在差异的可能原因，并得出结论，我们的结果与教学和其他线索相互作用的观点一致，但与教学线索具有特权作用的理论不一致。
