Changes in cognitive flexibility and hypothesis search across human life history from childhood to adolescence to adulthood
Changes in cognitive flexibility and hypothesis search across human life history from childhood to adolescence to adulthood
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DOI：
10.1073/pnas.1700811114
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发表时间：
2017-07-25
影响因子：
11.1
通讯作者：
Dahl, Ronald E.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Gopnik, Alison;O'Grady, Shaun;Dahl, Ronald E.
我们独特的生物生命史的进化与人类独特的认知和文化发展有什么关系？我们认为，延长的人类童年和青春期允许在探索和利用之间，在更广泛和更狭窄的假设搜索之间，以及在文化学习中的创新和模仿之间取得平衡。特别是，不同的发展阶段可能与不同的学习策略有关。生物学和文化之间的这种关系可能是共同进化和双向的：生活史的变化允许学习的变化，这反过来又允许和奖励延长的生活史。在两项研究中，我们测试了人们从证据模式中了解不寻常的物理或社会因果关系的容易程度。我们追踪这种能力的发展，从童年早期到青春期和成年期。在身体方面，学龄前儿童比学龄儿童表现得更好，而学龄儿童又比青少年和成年人表现得更好。随着年龄的增长，学习者的灵活性越来越差：他们不太可能采用一开始不熟悉的、与新证据一致的假设。相反，学习者更喜欢与证据不太一致的熟悉假设。在社会领域，学龄前儿童和青少年实际上是最灵活的学习者，他们比6岁的孩子或成年人更容易接受一个不寻常的假设。在进入童年中期和青春期时，灵活性可能有重要的发展转变，这在不同领域是不同的。
How was the evolution of our unique biological life history related to distinctive human developments in cognition and culture? We suggest that the extended human childhood and adolescence allows a balance between exploration and exploitation, between wider and narrower hypothesis search, and between innovation and imitation in cultural learning. In particular, different developmental periods may be associated with different learning strategies. This relation between biology and culture was probably coevolutionary and bidirectional: life-history changes allowed changes in learning, which in turn both allowed and rewarded extended life histories. In two studies, we test how easily people learn an unusual physical or social causal relation from a pattern of evidence. We track the development of this ability from early childhood through adolescence and adulthood. In the physical domain, preschoolers, counterintuitively, perform better than school-aged children, who in turn perform better than adolescents and adults. As they grow older learners are less flexible: they are less likely to adopt an initially unfamiliar hypothesis that is consistent with new evidence. Instead, learners prefer a familiar hypothesis that is less consistent with the evidence. In the social domain, both preschoolers and adolescents are actually the most flexible learners, adopting an unusual hypothesis more easily than either 6-y-olds or adults. There may be important developmental transitions in flexibility at the entry into middle childhood and in adolescence, which differ across domains.