HDE 103 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Tabula Rasa, Oxymoron, Numeracy
11 Jun 2018
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I. Lecture 8: Making Sense Through Play and Toys (May 14, 2018)
A. Learning to work is play
1. Humans are different than most mammals because…
a. While they have larger more dendritically dense brains, they are still very neontenous and dependent
on adults for virtually everything
2. Children are “brainy behavioral incompetents” or “culturally naïve”
3. How children make sense of their world is broken into two parts:
a. One part: they strive to make sense and understand what is going on around them
b. Second part: they are striving to be accepted and fit in
4. Universally, children are avid spectators (i.e., they like to observe)
a. Children learn A LOT through observation and imitation
b. And they learn A LOT by their desire (perhaps innate Piaget) to explore and make sense of objects in
their surroundings
c. Both of these can be provisioned by adults (toys, objects, narratives)
B. Compliance training
1. Parents in WEIRD cultures are enthusiastic to give lessons and narratives about what is proper, right, and
required, and what is improper, wrong, and not acceptable
2. Most of the rest of the world do not think children are capable of making sense of these lessons, and expect
children to learn by being seen but not heard
a. Why? – Many families’ “work” is in the home, and in the rest of the world, so perhaps that’s the
explanation. In the West, children’s space is the home.
3. Universally, parents are eager to teach children proper kin terms
a. This helps know who to give deference to, and encourages the sharing and flow of information
C. Gender compliance
1. Follows the same path, and children across cultures learn the expectations for the gender they identify well
before puberty
2. Recall: some societies have stricter divisions of gender roles than others
a. Toddlers are almost universally “children”, while middle childhood they transition to “boy” or “girl”
D. Another Sacred Cow…
1. WEIRD science and policy tends to expect children’s transition into society to be critically dependent on
guidance and lessons
a. First from eager parents
i. Biologically: want children to distance/self-sufficient to be able to have more children
ii. Culturally: at some point, parents won’t be around and they want children to fit in
b. Second from teachers
2. However, the ethnographic record of observations shows unequivocally the unimportance of teaching for
children’s learning
a. (Note: this is not against teaching of subjects in school, but that formal teaching is necessary for
children to learn (recall: Piaget and Vygotsky))
3. Sum: children will learn most of what is important from watching, imitating, pretending, during play with
their peers
E. Wise babies
1. Babies appear to be selected to be information extractors
2. Parents from WEIRD and cultures in eastern Asia tend to assume that children require mental stimulation
a. The rest of the world appear to assume that children have “no sense” and at least no foundations to
connect their sense to
3. Infant cognition, would be considered an oxymoron to most, and yet, they have a deep understanding of
physics, numeracy, biology, and psychology by 4 months
a. Core knowledge (to a nativist or innate leaning thinker)
b. Fast-mapping/learning devices (to an empiricist or learning leaning thinker)
c. Both are views that challenge the notion that children are born as tabula rasa (blank slates)
4. Parsing, to see below the surface of behavior or objects to detect logical organization of things
a. Language, physical properties, behavior or peers/companions
5. Learning through imitation and observation is what we mean by social learning
a. Important to make sense of things, but most important for our purposes to make sense of language
b. Prior knowledge believed children learned language from parents
c. But, recent evidence suggests they can learn communication systems from scratch and relatively
quickly, without a prior model (e.g., baby signs)
6. Well before language, modern studies show children capable of understanding social relationships
a. Scientist/Machiavellian in the crib, the child is learning to attend, befriend, and manipulate those with
power around them
7. Neontenous or precocious? Or a mix?
a. Precocious in emotional understanding
b. Decoding emotional facial expressions
c. Preference to language, dialect, and voices
d. Following their mother’s gaze
e. Use others’ emotional cues to guide their gaze, and correct behavior
f. Reacting appropriately to secondary emotions (all by 18 months)
F. Decoding emotional information is life
1. Because of their mastery of emotions, they can create efficient tactics to follow a general strategy to get
resources (e.g., objects, attention) from others
2. Concrete at first, with practice and time (i.e., development of underlying physiology) they can abstract
intentions from adult and others
a. We show this by children copying and imitating the eventual goals of the behavior of others, not the
behaviors themselves (i.e., forward thinking, planning)
3. Another capacity of social learning is the ability to defer a lesson from one context and save it for later
a. Buzzing confusion (William James) described childhood as nonstop learning, and studies confirm this
observation
b. But, importantly, culture expects this and creates environments to support and encourage this behavior
G. Children as Spectators
1. Listening to what happens around you gives you the language to succeed within your surroundings
a. School teaches you to go beyond your surroundings, but for most, the idea of leaving home is never
possible
2. Kpelle children spend a lot of time watching trials held by the chief
a. Largely agreed, these events are boring
b. And yet, children watch avidly. And where there is observation, there is soon to be imitation
i. “Children in their high squeaky voices are keen to play law court, dispensing judgment for the
theft of toys or the breaking of pre-regulated rules of play” – they apply what they see around
their world into their realm of play
3. Most societies, if not all observed, show a keen awareness that children are observers and listeners and
expect to use public displays and events to teach children
H. Eavesdropping children
1. Children play on the periphery of adults
a. They learn complex rules and norms by taking words and behaviors from adults (without an
understanding) and then making meaning of it while playing
b. Children learn complex rules about sex, chastity, and moral behaviors from public rituals
i. Even though they might not “understand” what they are mimicking
2. Children learn where they come from, who their ancestors are from listening to elders talk
a. Because they are dependent on provisioning, and they know to follow those who are “big” to get what
they need, they hijack this system to learn about their culture and how to manipulate it
I. Heated Debates
1. Is culture a unique human phenomenon?
a. Chimps show different behaviors in different ecologies
b. Chimps will fish for termites differently
c. Chimps will pass this information on one generation to the next
i. Variability between families – ergo, culture!
d. *Key point: the intergenerational transmission is spurred on by juveniles observing and imitating their
adults
i. So, who is responsible for interpreting and reproducing culture?
2. Primate studies collective are suggesting facultative (i.e., responsive and learned) behavior not hard-wired
a. What are your thoughts on this explanation as a proof of culture?
J. Adjusting our definiton of culture
1. “It is possible to regard all cultre as info and to view any single culture as an “info economy” in which info
is received or created, stored, retrieved, transmitted, utilized, and even lost…info is stored in the minds of
members and artifacts… [in this view, children are seen as] storage units [which] must be added to the
system [integrate into society] as older members of the society disappear and die” ~Roberts
2. If culture is info, how do they acquire it?
a. Learn through observation and mimicking behavior, even when the teacher is not intentionally
teaching, demonstrating, or instructing this is very important to understand
K. Trial and Error or Copy
1. “It is patently less costly for an individual to observe and attempt to replicate the proficient behaviors of an
expert, or presumed expert, rather than operate in a social vacuum or “learn individually”” ~McElreath
2. Researchers personal experience across the globe confirm:
a. Children will playfully lead you through a jungle environment to find edible mushrooms, that adults
couldn’t see
b. Children will follow the paths of ants to sources of fruit, or food
c. Ache children learn the signs of Ache having walked here before age 8 (they know specifically when a
hunter/gather has walked on a particular path to navigate well)
L. Open Attention
1. Children tend to sustain attention, rather than have episodic or short-term intentionally seen in formal
settings
2. Rather, than attending to a single source, in open attention children attend to all sources
a. Zapotec children’s knowledge of ethnobotany surprises the PhD in the area
b. Eveny (Siberian) adolescents can distinguish individual characteristics of reindeer in various migrating
herds
c. Aivilik (Canadian?Artic cultures) can distinguish if a seal is on ice long before adults, eeven adults
with 20-20 eyesight, because they attend to all cues
M. WEIRD attention
1. In comparative studies, children from WEIRD cultures have short, fleeting, and precision attention on
singular episodes, events, and teachers
2. Children in Western cultures ignore learning events when they are not explicitly the target
3. Western children will follow prescribed strategies to solve tasks, Aboriginal children in Australia will solve
tasks with many strategies
a. Western mothers will remind children to encourage play, “What does mommy or daddy do when…”
thus, reinforcing that mother/father/teacher is the source, and their information is the only cue
N. Primate learning capacities
1. Primates drives to act in their environments in every way possible – brings a feeling of efficacy
2. This efficacy grows into a drive for mastery and success which builds social capital
a. Practical success efficacy (e.g., carrying fire wood home)
b. Efficacy drives for mastery and success (e.g., invited to forage and hunt)
c. Social capital successful adulating
3. Drives to fit in, and to be like those around us because
a. More likely to identify similar threats
b. More likely to share food and stuff
c. (Life’s a pain in the ass, and it’s way easier in groups)
O. In sum…transitioning from selfish to groups
1. Children are selfish, egocentric, and attending to everything
2. Yet, this transitions and build to two drives
a. Drive to acquire skills and the drive to fit in key point!
3. Still remains to be answered: How do they do this?
P. Playing with objects
1. Object play of children is souped-up continuation of infant’s exploration of objects
a. Children can explore objects using many capacities compared to an infant
i. Hand, mouth, sounds
ii. They can throw them, use them as hammers, toss them into puddles of water/mud or off other
objects
b. Inevitably, children will get their hands on tools
Document Summary
Many families" work is in the home, and in the rest of the world, so perhaps that"s the explanation. In the west, children"s space is the home: universally, parents are eager to teach children proper kin terms, this helps know who to give deference to, and encourages the sharing and flow of information, gender compliance. First from eager parents: biologically: want children to distance/self-sufficient to be able to have more children, culturally: at some point, parents won"t be around and they want children to fit in. Sum: children will learn most of what is important from watching, imitating, pretending, during play with their peers: wise babies, babies appear to be selected to be information extractors. Parsing, to see below the surface of behavior or objects to detect logical organization of things: language, physical properties, behavior or peers/companions. Fast-mapping/learning devices (to an empiricist or learning leaning thinker: learning through imitation and observation is what we mean by social learning.
