Rights statement: This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Bazhydai, M, Silverstein, P, Parise, E, Westermann, G. Two‐year‐old children preferentially transmit simple actions but not pedagogically demonstrated actions. Developmental Science 2020; 23:e12941 which has been published in final form at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/desc.12941 This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for self-archiving.
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Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Two-year old children preferentially transmit simple actions but not pedagogically demonstrated actions
AU - Bazhydai, Marina
AU - Silverstein, Priya
AU - Parise, Eugenio
AU - Westermann, Gert
N1 - This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Bazhydai, M, Silverstein, P, Parise, E, Westermann, G. Two‐year‐old children preferentially transmit simple actions but not pedagogically demonstrated actions. Developmental Science 2020; 23:e12941 which has been published in final form at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/desc.12941 This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for self-archiving.
PY - 2020/9/1
Y1 - 2020/9/1
N2 - 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 (2015) 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.
AB - 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 (2015) 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.
U2 - 10.1111/desc.12941
DO - 10.1111/desc.12941
M3 - Journal article
VL - 23
JO - Developmental Science
JF - Developmental Science
SN - 1363-755X
IS - 5
M1 - e12941
ER -