Uncovering the determinants of the discovery, utilisation and transmission of information through social learning and innovation in young children

创新和社会学习是使人类能够居住在世界各个角落的两项关键技能。它们是“文化”的基础，因为社会学习有助于忠实地获取和传播由几代人积累起来的知识组成的文化习俗，而创新使人们能够适应这些行为和知识，使它们变得更有效率，这是在不断变化的环境中生存所必需的技能。模仿另一个人的行为意味着一个人可以快速获得必要的信息，而不是通过一个试错学习的过程，这意味着任何适应都不会在自己的存在之外存活。然而，模仿他人并不一定会产生最佳行为。如果一个种群中的所有个体都在模仿它们周围的个体，那么就没有个体在对环境进行采样，并确定另一种行为是否会更有成效；因此，单是复制就会产生一个“卡住”的种群。为了使行为变得更加高效和有效，一个人或一群人必须走出现状，对当前的做法做出改变。因此，当面对一项新任务时，个体需要决定是在没有任何其他信息的情况下独自尝试任务（社会学习），还是模仿另一个人或一群人（社会学习），还是观察他人，然后适应他/他目睹他人所做的事情（创新），以便以最有效的方式实现目标。因此，个人必须决定自己的学习策略。在这一系列的研究中，我们打算了解儿童早期对社会学习和/或非社会学习的依赖是如何变化的，以及个人学习或观察他人学习的倾向是否受到学习环境的影响。我们建议采用一种多维度的方法来调查学习情境的全部背景，包括儿童为任务带来的特征（例如，年龄、性别以及认知和社会因素）、模型特征的作用（例如，他们报告的专业知识，以及看到多个模型执行一个动作的影响），以及背景因素的作用（例如，任务的难度和社会压力）。从理论上讲，社会学习和创新的使用率与两个因素有关：合作和竞争。通过共同协作，我们比单独工作取得了更多的成就，可能通过忠实地复制成功的行为、突出重要信息的教学或思想的交流和讨论等过程。然而，也有人对竞争在创新中的作用提出了相关主张；商业分析师认为，没有竞争，创新就会减少，而对非人类动物行为感兴趣的研究人员表明，创新出现在竞争环境中。使用开放扩散设计，其中行为获取和传播是跨个人群体进行跟踪，我们将看看一个人的动机感觉（为自己工作或为自己的团队工作）和任务的性质（一个协作任务与一个可以独立工作的任务）如何影响社会学习或创新行为的产生和传播。最后，环境很少是不变的，所以我们通过探索意外变化的影响（之前有效的行为将不再有效，但新的行为将有效，并且奖励水平将不一致）将进一步维度纳入我们的建议中。先前的研究发现，不确定的环境增加了对社会学习的依赖，个人在变化的时代不太愿意创新；因此，我们考虑这些发现在合作和竞争环境的光。

Innovation and social learning are two of the key skills that have allowed humans to inhabit all corners of the world. They underpin 'culture', as social learning facilitates the faithful acquisition and transmission of cultural practices that consist of knowledge that has been built up over generations, while innovation allows adaptations to such behaviours and knowledge so that they become more efficient, a skill essential to survival in a changing environment. Copying another individual's behaviour means one can acquire essential information quickly, as opposed to through a process of trial and error learning, which would mean that no adaptations would survive beyond one's own existence. However, copying others may not always result in optimum behaviour. If all individuals in a population copy those around them then no individual is sampling the environment and establishing whether another behaviour would be more productive; thus, copying alone produces a population which becomes 'stuck'. For behaviours to become more efficient and effective, an individual or a group of individuals must step outside the status quo and make a change to current practice. Thus when faced with a novel task an individual needs to decide whether to attempt the task alone without any other information (asocial learning), to copy another individual or group of individuals (social learning), or to observe others but then to adapt what s/he has witnessed others do (innovation), so that the goal is achieved in the most effective way. Thus individuals must decide on their learning strategy.In this series of studies we propose to understand how a reliance on social learning and/or asocial learning changes in early childhood, and whether any predispositions to learn personally or by watching others is dictated by the context of the learning situation. We propose to take a multidimensional approach that investigates the full context of the learning situation, including the characteristics a child brings to the task (e.g. age, gender, as well as cognitive and social factors), the role of a model's characteristics (e.g., their reported expertise, as well as the effect of seeing more than one model perform an action), and the role of contextual factors, (e.g., the difficulty of the task and social pressure). Theoretically the rate of use of social learning and innovation has been linked to two factors: cooperation and competition. By working together collaboratively we achieve more than working alone, potentially through processes such as faithful copying of successful behaviours, the pedagogical highlighting of important information or the communication and discussion of ideas. Yet, related claims have also been made for the role of competition in innovation; with business analysts suggesting that without competition innovation is lessened and researchers interested in non-human animal behaviour showing that innovation appears in competitive situations. Using an open diffusion design, in which behaviour acquisition and transmission is tracked across groups of individuals, we will look at how the motivations an individual feels (working for oneself or working for one's group) and the nature of the task (a collaborative task versus a task that can be worked independently) affects the production and transmission of socially learnt, or innovative behaviour. Finally, environments are rarely unchanging, and so we incorporate a further dimension into our proposal by exploring the effect of unexpected changes (previously efficient behaviours will no longer work but new behaviours will, and also the level of reward will be inconsistent). Previous work has found that uncertain environments increase reliance on social learning, with individuals being less willing to innovate in times of flux; therefore we consider these findings in the light of cooperative and competitive environments.