Social learning leads to inflexible strategy use in children across three societies

Abstract

Human adaptability relies on our capacity to learn, either from others (socially) or by ourselves (asocially), and to update our strategy repertoire. Cognitive flexibility is the psychological mechanism that mediates strategy use. Humans excel at switching from strategies that no longer work to new ones, but when given the chance to voluntarily switch from familiar to better strategies (elective flexibility), we often exhibit remarkable difficulty. However, current research has shown that this may be mediated by exogenous factors such as cultural background and age. The present study used a four-task battery to investigate the impact of social vs. asocial information sources on the development of elective flexibility in children (ages 4 to 14) from three cultural contexts: hunter-gatherer BaYaka; horticulturalists/fisherman Bandongo; and urbanized German. Our data show that German children exhibited overall higher elective flexibility than their Congolese peers whose elective flexibility decreased with age. Interestingly, children across all communities showed less elective flexibility when they learned a strategy socially than when they acquired it themselves. The present study provides important insights on the influence of eco-cultural contexts on the development of adaptive problem-solving, and the impact of social learning on children's elective flexibility.

Keywords: Cognitive flexibility; Cross-cultural psychology; Developmental psychology; Individual learning; Social learning.

Fig. 1

Elective flexibility developmental trajectory—Test Phase: a,b,c,d, show posterior estimates of the probability of using the Learned Strategy (LS) at each given age by children of different cultural backgrounds (egalitarian BaYaka, hierarchical Bandongo, and hierarchical German). Lines show posterior means and ribbons 95% HPD intervals. The trajectory shown is for the middle trial of the Test phase for each of the tasks. Dots represent the mean probability of LS-use (after the four trials) grouped by age and culture in children and adults in both conditions. The Asocial condition is represented by the color yellow ; while the Social condition is represented by the color green. a, Age trajectories for the Pin Box task. N_BaYaka = 45; N_Bandongo = 47; N_German = 52. b, Age trajectories for the Eco LS-DS task. N_BaYaka = 50; N_Bandongo = 51; N_German = 50. c, Age trajectories for the Lilypad task. N_BaYaka = 51; N_Bandongo = 51; N_German = 52. d, Age trajectories for the Maze task, N_BaYaka = 47; N_Bandongo = 50; N_German = 49.

Fig. 2

Elective flexibility developmental trajectory—Post-Extinction Phase: a,b,c,d, show posterior estimates of the probability of using the Learned Strategy at each given age by children of different cultural backgrounds (egalitarian BaYaka, hierarchical Bandongo, and hierarchical German). Lines show posterior means and ribbons 95% HPD intervals. The trajectories shown are for the middle trial of the Post-Extinction phase for each of the tasks. Dots represent the mean probability of LS-use (after the two trials) grouped by age and culture in children and adults in both conditions. The Asocial condition is represented by the color yellow; while the Social condition is represented by the color green. a, Age trajectories for the Pin Box task, N_BaYaka = 45; N_Bandongo = 47; N_German = 50. b, Age trajectories for the Eco LS-DS task, N_BaYaka = 50; N_Bandongo = 51; N_German = 50. c, Age trajectories for the Lilypad task, N_BaYaka = 51; N_Bandongo = 51; N_German = 52. d, Age trajectories for the Maze task, N_BaYaka = 46; N_Bandongo = 50; N_German = 49.