The ontogeny of cumulative culture: Individual toddlers vary in faithful imitation and goal emulation

Abstract

The success of human culture depends on early emerging mechanisms of social learning, which include the ability to acquire opaque cultural knowledge through faithful imitation, as well as the ability to advance culture through flexible discovery of new means to goal attainment. This study explores whether this mixture of faithful imitation and goal emulation is based in part on individual differences which emerge early in ontogeny. Experimental measurements and parental reports were collected for a group of 2‐year‐old children (N = 48, age = 23–32 months) on their imitative behavior as well as other aspects of cognitive and social development. Results revealed individual differences in children's imitative behavior across trials and tasks which were best characterized by a model that included two behavioral routines; one corresponding to faithful imitation, and one to goal emulation. Moreover, individual differences in faithful imitation and goal emulation were correlated with individual differences in theory of mind, prosocial behavior, and temperament. These findings were discussed in terms of their implications for understanding the mechanisms of social learning, ontogeny of cumulative culture, and the benefit of analyzing individual differences for developmental experiments.

Personality predicts innovation and social learning in children: Implications for cultural evolution

“…However, over time, children who are willing to tackle novel problems asocially acquire the cognitive resources (e.g., flexibility, creativity) to engage in successful innovation on new tasks. Our results also highlight the importance of assessing learning strategies across multiple tasks (for cross-task consistency in toddlers imitative learning, see Yu & Kushnir, 2020). Future work could assess cross-task consistency in other domains, such as conformity or measures of innovation on non-tool use tasks.…”

Specialization and selective social attention establishes the balance between individual and social learning

“…have not yet studied the stability of individual differences in strategy use. Recent work has found that differences in social learning strategies (imitation vs. emulation) emerge early in human ontogeny (Yu & Kushnir, 2020), which may persist as stable personality traits. Exploring the interplay between flexibility in social learning strategies, and consistent individual differences in social learning strategies is a fruitful avenue for future work.…”

The graded engagement model of admiration

“…This is both because they genuinely seem to enjoy parroting words and actions, and because they often lack the reflective distance and understanding to represent concepts, like charity or integrity, in their own actions. Psychologists Yu and Kushnir (2020) note that children imitate more faithfully – ‘copying the exact form of an action or a sequence of actions, with or without being aware of the goal behind it’ – when ‘causal mechanisms are opaque’ to them (p. 1).…”

“…Flexibility of imitation depends on cognitive and social maturity, situational knowledge, and a range of experiences young children likely do not yet possess, and their high-fidelity appropriations often signal a lack of understanding (Yu and Kushnir 2020: 1). However, just because mimetic appropriation is typical of children, it does not follow that appropriation is not also often suitable for mature learners.…”

“…One caveat about this stage is that there is individual variation in the kinds of information learners take from watching an exemplar, and in the normative assessments they make of these actions. Yu and Kushnir (2020) note that 'individual differences in the ease with which children make appropriate inferences (e.g. due to differences in knowledge, experience, or general cognitive and social abilities) might contribute to individual differences in imitative behavior'.…”