CHYS 1F90 Chapter Notes - Chapter 6: Cultural Learning, Social Cognition
7 Oct 2016
School
Department
Course
Professor
Childrens Selective Social Learning
• Evolutionary and developmental insight into children’s social learning have
great potential for cross-fertilization
• Evolutionary theories can generate and integrate developmental hypotheses,
while developmental investigations test and inform evolutionary theory
Evolved Cumulative Cultural Learning and the Development of Social
Cognition: Pg 182-
• Cultural learning is the social transmission of behaviors from one individual to
another
• Cultural repertoire is the cultural knowhow transmitted between generations
• Cultural knowledge imply phenotypic predictions about the development of
social cognition
• Phenotypic predictions can be divided into 2 classes;
o Relative Model Biases help learners identify models possessing
knowledge relevant to them (applies to their age, sex, cultural/social
group)
o Absolute Model Biases help identify models whose cultural knowledge
is just better (more accurate or useful)
• Relative Model Bias: Self-Similarity- Children and adults seem particularly
disposed to learn from those who share their existing beliefs
Absolute Model Bias: Skill: Pg 183-
• Young children prefer learning from more confident cultural models, potentially
exploiting the model’s own assessment of his or her skills
Overview:
• Children trust the testimony of adults over their own perception and imitate
adults obviously redundant actions
• Culture-Gene Coevolutionary theorists predict which phenotypes are robustly
selected for in a species dependent on cultural learning
• CGC refers to the set of predictions derived by reasoning about how selective
pressures shaped our cultural species
• Rather than explaining how cognitive mechanisms influence children’s behavior,
they help us understand why these particular mechanisms should exist in the
first place
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