Observational Learning in the Second Year
Aims and objectives of the research
Funded by the Leverhulme Trust, this recently completed project tested the predictions of a new theory of natural 'pedagogy' in 14- and 18- month old infants. That is, the project tested whether there is a fast and efficient way of learning that is specific to humans and their social environment.
The studies provided strong empirical support for a new theoretical approach concerning the nature of human cultural learning and knowledge transfer, by showing that such learning is relevance-guided and selective, that it is a function of social cuing, and that 'teaching' is a manifestation of new and relevant information.
This theory and the current results contradict currently standard views of cultural learning as being imitative, identification-based and automatic in humans.
Results and conclusions
According to this project, we can draw several conclusions about the way in which children learn in their second year.
Firstly, preverbal infants show special sensitivity to ostensive-communicative cues (such as eye-contact, turn-taking contingent reactivity, motherese) that other humans address to them.
Secondly, such cues trigger a specific receptive attitude and fast-learning mode to encode, retain, and imitate the new and relevant cultural information manifested to them.
Thirdly, infants show selective imitation and fast-learning only when the relevant cultural information is presented in an ostensive-communicative 'teaching' context (human 'pedagogy'), but not when they observe the same information without being communicatively addressed.
Finally, children can fast-learn new cultural information under ostensive 'pedagogical' conditions that are partially cognitively 'opaque' to them (i.e. when there are aspects that they cannot rationalize).
The project concluded that these findings support the existence of a specialized cultural learning system that has evolved in humans to make the fast and efficient transfer of cognitively opaque but culturally highly relevant knowledge possible.
This helps explain how arbitrary and conventional human cultural knowledge has spread and been maintained beyond the causal or functional comprehension competences of the individual observational learner.
This kind of cultural knowledge transmission may differentiate human culture and cultural learning from non-human social cultural transmission (as in primates).
Strengths and weaknesses of the research
Some of the planned testing artifacts did not work, but these were successfully replaced, resulting in unplanned, but quite appropriate, changes in the study design). The studies produced very clear and significant results that already have and will continue to make a significant theoretical impact on the fields of cognitive developmental psychology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive cultural anthropology, comparative psychology, and philosophy of mind.
Resulting publications
The results have either already been published (or are being submitted to or are currently under review) in peer-reviewed journals of very high impact factors (Nature, Interaction Studies, Attention & Performance, Developmental Science, Cognitive Psychology) and in edited volumes published by scientific publishers of the highest rating (Oxford: Berg Publishers; Oxford University Press).