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A cross-cultural investigation of young children’s spontaneous invention of tool use behaviours

- Neldner, Karri, Reindl, Eva, Tennie, Claudio, Grant, Julie, Tomaselli, Keyan, Nielsen, Mark

A cross-cultural investigation of young children’s spontaneous invention of tool use behaviours

- Nelder, Karri, Tennie, Claudio, Reindi, Eva, Grant, Julie, Tomaselli, Keyan, Nielsen, Mark

  • Authors: Nelder, Karri , Tennie, Claudio , Reindi, Eva , Grant, Julie , Tomaselli, Keyan , Nielsen, Mark
  • Date: 2020
  • Subjects: Tool use , Problem sovling , Physical cognition
  • Language: English
  • Type: Article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10210/434105 , uj:37561 , Nelder, K. et al. 2020: A cross-cultural investigation of young children’s spontaneous invention of tool use behaviours
  • Description: Abstract: , Through the mechanisms of observation, imitation and teaching, young children readily pick up the tool using behaviours of their culture. However, little is known about the baseline abilities of children's tool use: what they might be capable of inventing on their own in the absence of socially provided information. It has been shown that children can spontaneously invent 11 of 12 candidate tool using behaviours observed within the foraging behaviours of wild non-human apes (Reindl et al. 2016 Proc. R. Soc. B283, 20152402. (doi:10.1098/rspb.2015.2402)). However, no investigations to date have examined how tool use invention in children might vary across cultural contexts. The current study investigated the levels of spontaneous tool use invention in 2- to 5-year-old children from San Bushmen communities in South Africa and children in a large city in Australia on the same 12 candidate problem-solving tasks. Children in both cultural contexts correctly invented all 12 candidate tool using behaviours, suggesting that these behaviours are within the general cognitive and physical capacities of human children and can be produced in the absence of direct social learning mechanisms such as teaching or observation. Children in both cultures were more likely to invent those tool behaviours more frequently observed in great ape populations than those less frequently observed, suggesting there is similarity in the level of difficulty of invention across these behaviours for all great ape species. However, children in the Australian sample invented tool behaviours and succeeded on the tasks more often than did the Bushmen children, highlighting that aspects of a child's social or cultural environment may influence the rates of their tool use invention on such task sets, even when direct social information is absent.
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Children's tool innovation across culture

- Neldner, Karri, Redshaw, Jonathan, Murphy, Sean, Tomaselli, Keyan, Jacqueline, Davis,, Dixson, Barnaby, Nielsen, Mark

  • Authors: Neldner, Karri , Redshaw, Jonathan , Murphy, Sean , Tomaselli, Keyan , Jacqueline, Davis, , Dixson, Barnaby , Nielsen, Mark
  • Date: 2019
  • Subjects: Tool innovation , Cross-cultural , Innovation
  • Language: English
  • Type: Article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10210/407171 , uj:34262 , Citation: Neldner, K. et al. 2019: Children's tool innovation across culture.
  • Description: Abstract: Prior research suggests that human children lack an aptitude for tool innovation. However, children’s tool making must be explored across a broader range of tasks and across diverse cultural contexts before we can conclude that they are genuinely poor tool innovators. To this end, we investigated children’s ability to independently construct three new tools using distinct actions: adding, subtracting and reshaping. We tested 422 children across a broad age range from five geographic locations across South Africa (N = 126), Vanuatu (N = 190) and Australia (N = 106), which varied in their levels of exposure to Westernized culture. Children were shown a horizontal, transparent tube that had a sticker in its middle. Children were sequentially given each incomplete tool, which when accurately constructed could be used to push the sticker out of the tube. As predicted, older children were better at performing the innovation tasks than younger children across all cultures and innovation actions. We also found evidence for cultural variation: while all non‐Western groups performed similarly, the Western group of children innovated at higher rates. However, children who did not innovate often adopted alternate methods when using the tools that also led to success. This suggests that children’s innovation levels are influenced by the cultural environment, and highlights the flexibility inherent in human children’s tool use.
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Comprehensive longitudinal study challenges the existence of neonatal imitation in humans

- Oostenbroek, Janine, Suddendorf, Thomas, Nielsen, Mark, Redshaw, Jonathan, Kennedy-Costantini, Siobhan, Davis, Jacqueline, Clark, Sally, Slaughter, Virginia

Imitation, collaboration and their interaction among western and indigenous Australian preschool children

- Nielsen, Mark, Mushin, Ilana, Tomaselli, Keyan, Whiten, Andrew

Preschool’s children’s learning proclivities: when the ritual stance trumps the instrumental stance

- Wilks, Matti, Kapitány, Rohan, Nielsen, Mark

  • Authors: Wilks, Matti , Kapitány, Rohan , Nielsen, Mark
  • Date: 2016
  • Language: English
  • Type: Article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10210/122786 , uj:20704 , Citation: Wilks, M., Kapitány, R. & Nielsen, M. 2016. Preschool’s children’s learning proclivities: when the ritual stance trumps the instrumental stance.
  • Description: Abstract: Previous research has demonstrated an efficiency bias in social learning whereby young children preferentially imitate the functional actions of a successful group member over an individual. Our aim in the current research was to examine whether this bias remains when actions are presented as conventional rather than instrumental. Preschool children watched videos of an individual and a group member. The individual always demonstrated a successful instrumental action and the group member an unsuccessful action that was either causally transparent or opaque. Highlighting the selective nature of social learning, children copied the group at higher rates when the demonstrated actions were causally opaque than when they were causally transparent. This research draws attention to the influence of conventional/ritual-like actions on young children’s learning choices and emphasizes the role 31 of this orientation in the development of human-specific cumulative culture.
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Ritualized objects: how we perceive and respond to causally opaque and goal demoted action

- Kapitάny, Rohan, Nielsen, Mark

The influence of goal demotion on children’s reproduction of ritual behavior

- Nielsen, Mark, Tomaselli, Keyan, Kapitány, Rohan

The influence of goal demotion on children’s reproduction of ritual behavior

- Nielsen, Mark, Tomaselli, Keyan, Kapitány, Rohan

The persistent sampling bias in developmental psychology: a call to action

- Nielsen, Mark, Haun, Daniel, Kärtner, Joscha, Legare, Cristine H.

  • Authors: Nielsen, Mark , Haun, Daniel , Kärtner, Joscha , Legare, Cristine H.
  • Date: 2017
  • Subjects: WEIRD data , Cross-cultural research , Generalizable data
  • Language: English
  • Type: Article
  • Identifier: http://ujcontent.uj.ac.za8080/10210/368695 , http://hdl.handle.net/10210/231911 , uj:23638 , Citation: Nielsen, M. et al. 2017. he persistent sampling bias in developmental psychology: a call to action.
  • Description: Abstract: Psychology must confront the bias in its broad literature towards the study of participants developing in environments unrepresentative of the vast majority of the world’s population. Here, we focus on the implications of addressing this challenge, highlight the need to address over-reliance on a narrow participant pool, and emphasize the value and necessity of conducting research with diverse populations. We show that high impact-factor developmental journals are heavily skewed towards publishing papers with data from WEIRD populations (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic). Most critically, despite calls for change and supposed widespread awareness of this problem, there is a habitual dependence on convenience sampling and little evidence that the discipline is making any meaningful movement towards drawing from diverse samples. Failure to confront the possibility that culturally-specific findings are being misattributed as universal traits has broad implications for the construction of scientifically defensible theories and for the reliable public dissemination of study findings.
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The Ritual Stance and the Precaution System: The role of goal-demotion and opacity in ritual and everyday actions

- Kapitány, Rohan, Nielsen, Mark

  • Authors: Kapitány, Rohan , Nielsen, Mark
  • Date: 2017
  • Language: English
  • Type: Article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10210/258784 , uj:27221 , Citation: Kapitány, R. & Nielsen, M. 2017. The Ritual Stance and the Precaution System: The role of goal-demotion and opacity in ritual and everyday actions.
  • Description: Abstract: Rituals tend to be both causally opaque and goal-demoted, yet these two qualities are rarely dissociated in the literature. Here we manipulate both factors and demonstrate their unique influence on ritual cognition. In a 2 x 3 (Action-Type x Goal-Information) between subjects design 484 US adults viewed Causally Opaque (Ritual) or Causally Transparent (Ordinary) actions performed on identical objects. They were provided with no goal information, positive goal information (‘Blessing’) or negative goal information (‘Cursing’). Neither causal opacity nor goal information influenced perceptions of physical change/causation. In contrast, causal opacity increased attributions of ‘specialness’, whereas goal-information did not. Finally, goal-information interacted with action-type on measures of preference, such that ordinary actions are influenced by both ‘blessings’ and ‘curses’, but ritual actions are only influenced by ‘curses’. These findings are interpreted in light of the Ritual Stance, and the cognitive bases of the effects are described with reference to Boyer and Liénard’s Precaution theory of ritualized behavior. The combined value of these two theories is discussed, and extended to a causal model of developmental ritual ‘calibration’.
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The social glue of cumulative culture and ritual behavior

- Nielsen, Mark

  • Authors: Nielsen, Mark
  • Date: 2018
  • Language: English
  • Type: Article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10210/286257 , uj:30972 , Citation: Nielsen, M. 2018. The social glue of cumulative culture and ritual behavior.
  • Description: Abstract: Cumulative culture, where innovations are progressively incorporated into a population’s stock of skills and knowledge, generating ever more sophisticated repertoires, is a core aspect of human cognition that underpins the technological advances which characterize our species. Cumulative culture relies on our proclivity for high fidelity imitation, something that emerged phylogenetically early in our evolutionary history and emerges ontogenetically early in our development. Commensurate with this proclivity to copy others comes a tradeoff that functionally irrelevant behaviors will be easily maintained and transmitted. Rituals are an expression of this. In this paper, I set out the argument that the core cognitive architecture responsible for cumulative culture and technological progress has the same origin as that which propagates rituals: That is, our socially-motivated propensity for engaging in high-fidelity imitation.
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Why developmental psychology is incomplete without comparative and cross-cultural perspectives

- Nielsen, Mark, Haun, Daniel

Young children from three diverse cultures spontaneously and consistently prepare for alternative future possibilities

- Redshaw, Jonathan, Suddendorf, Thomas, Neldner, Karri, Wilks, Matti, Tomaselli, Keyan, Mushin, Ilana, Nielsen, Mark

Young children from three diverse cultures spontaneously and consistently prepare for alternative future possibilities

- Redshaw, Jonathan, Suddendorf, Thomas, Neldner, Karri, Wilks, Matti, Tomaselli, Keyan, Mushin, Ilana, Nielsen, Mark

Young children’s tool innovation across culture : affordance visibility matters

- Neldner, Karri, Mushin, Ilana, Nielsen, Mark

  • Authors: Neldner, Karri , Mushin, Ilana , Nielsen, Mark
  • Date: 2017
  • Subjects: Cross-cultural , Tool manufacture , Tool innovation
  • Language: English
  • Type: Article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10210/259831 , uj:27346 , Citation: Neldner, K., Mushin, I. & Nielsen, M. 2017. Young children’s tool innovation across culture : affordance visibility matters.
  • Description: Abstract: Young children typically demonstrate low rates of tool innovation. However, previous studies have limited children’s performance by presenting tools with opaque affordances. In an attempt to scaffold children’s understanding of what constitutes an appropriate tool within an innovation task we compared tools in which the focal affordance was visible to those in which it was opaque. To evaluate possible cultural specificity, data collection was undertaken in a Western urban population and a remote Indigenous community. As expected affordance visibility altered innovation rates: young children were more likely to innovate on a tool that had visible affordances than one with concealed affordances. Furthermore, innovation rates were higher than those reported in previous innovation studies. Cultural background did not affect children’s rates of tool innovation. It is suggested that new methods for testing tool innovation in children must be developed in order to broaden our knowledge of young children’s tool innovation capabilities.
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