Dr. Amanda Woodward (University of Chicago) https://humdev.uchicago.edu/directory/amanda-woodward http://woodwardlab.uchicago.edu/

When: Thursday, February 1st at 16h00 Title: How is infants' social learning shaped by their social environments? Where: Concordia U, Loyola campus, SP-157

Abstract: Much of what children learn early in life comes to them by way of other people. The ability to be an adept social learner is both a hallmark of human nature and an engine for early development. By the time they are 18 months of age, infants have learned a great deal about the ways of acting, talking and interacting that are particular to their social communities. How do they do it?

One class of scientific answers to this question focuses learning episodes in which an adult intentionally communicates the to-be-learned information in a kind of child-directed pedagogy, for example, by drawing the infant's attention and then pointing to and labeling a referent or demonstrating the appropriate use of an artifact. In these situations, the adult does much of the heavy lifting by directing the infant's attention and making salient the information that is to be learned. It has been suggested that child-directed pedagogical interactions provide the ideal conditions for the transmission of cultural information, and that infants are adapted to be responsive to these contexts (see Shneidman & Woodward, 2016 for a review).

On the other hand, most of children's daily experience does not involve child-directed teaching, and there is likely to be information to be gleaned by the smart observer from watching the actions of others during those times. Learning in these situations requires the child to direct his or her own attention and actions strategically. Cross- cultural studies have suggested that in some communities school-aged children are particularly skilled at doing this, learning just as readily from observation as from teaching (e.g., Gaskins & Paradise, 2010; Rogoff, 2003). A question is whether infants are similarly flexible in their ability to learn across varied social contexts, or whether, instead, infants' social learning is heavily dependent on adult teaching.

In this presentation, I'll describe studies that seek answers to this question by examining the learning propensities and daily environments of 18-month-old infants in two cultural contexts: a large city in the U.S. and rural Mayan community in Mexico. A starting point of these studies was to ask whether, and how, infants' approach to learning varies as a function of the prevalence of child-directed teaching in their lives. Observational studies have documented that the two communities differ in this regard. Whereas child-directed teaching is relatively common in the lives infants in the urban U.S., it is relatively uncommon in the lives of rural Mayan infants.

We tested both groups of infants in laboratory procedures in which novel actions and novel words were introduced, either by child-directed teaching or by being available for infants to observe in other people's interactions, and then we tested whether infants learned and remembered the words and actions. If infants are initially dependent on adults’ teaching, we would expect infants in both communities to show similar patterns in social learning-- with both groups learning taught information more readily that observed information. On the other hand if even very young learners are flexible, we predict that infants may learn in both contexts, and that the two groups of infants will show different learning patterns that correspond to regularities in their social environments.

In some ways, the two groups responded similarly. Both U.S. and Mayan infants showed above baseline learning for both taught and observed information, suggesting that across variation in the prevalence of teaching, infants are able to glean social information relatively broadly. In other ways, the two groups of infants responded differently. US infants showed a propensity to respond to child-directed teaching more strongly than to observed events, whereas Mayan infants seemed equally able to learn from both kinds of experiences (Shneidman et al., 2016; Burke et al., 2017). That is, infants showed evidence of shaping their learning to fit with regularities in their experience (see also Shneidman et al., 2009).

Our findings also revealed differences we had not anticipated. For example, in an analysis of videos of each infant at home, we sought to characterize the prevalence of child-directed teaching each infant experienced. But the difference that was most obvious was that Mayan infants spent far more time alone, in self-directed activity, than did U.S. infants. Longer bouts of time alone were associated with the infant engaging in more extended, and more complex actions on objects, suggesting that time alone has some benefits (Basargekar et al., 2017).