Infants pick intelligent adults

From The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich. How culture is driving evolution. Page 41.

In the last fifteen years, an important complementary line of evidence has become available as developmental psychologists have returned to focusing on cultural learning in children and infants. With new evolutionary thinking in the air, they have zoomed in on testing specific ideas about the who, when, and what of cultural learning. It’s now clear that infants and young children use cues of competence and reliability, along with familiarity, to figure out from whom to learn. In fact, by age one, infants use their own early cultural knowledge to figure out who tends to know things, and then use this performance information to focus their learning, attention, and memory.

Infants are well known to engage in what developmental psychologists call “social referencing.” When an infant, or young child, encounters something novel, say when crawling up to a chainsaw, they will often look at their mom, or some other adult in the room, to check for an emotional reaction. If the attending adult shows positive affect, they often proceed to investigate the novel object. If the adult shows fear or concern, they back off. This occurs even if the attending adult is a stranger. In one experiment, mothers brought one-year-olds to the laboratory at Seoul National University. The infants were allowed to play and get comfortable in the new environment, while mom received training for her role in the experiment. The researchers had selected three categories of toys, those to which infants typically react (1) positively, (2) negatively, and (3) with uncertain curiosity (an ambiguous toy). These different kinds of toys were each placed in front of the infants, one at a time, and the infant’s reactions were recorded. Mom and a female stranger sat on either side of the baby and were instructed to react either with smiling and excitement or with fear.

The results of this study are strikingly parallel to studies of cultural learning among both young children and university students. First, the babies engaged in social referencing, looking at one of the adults, four times more often, and more quickly, when an ambiguous toy was placed in front of them. That is, under uncertainty, they used cultural learning. This is precisely what an evolutionary approach predicts for when individuals should use cultural learning (see note 9). Second, when faced with an ambiguous toy, babies altered their behavior based on the adults’ emotional reactions: when they saw fear, they backed off, but when they saw happiness, they approached the toy and changed to regard it more positively. Third, infants tended to reference the stranger more than their moms, probably because mom herself was new to this environment and was thus judged less competent by her baby.

By 14 months, infants are already well beyond social referencing and already showing signs of using skill or competence cues to select models. After observing an adult model acting confused by shoes, placing them on his hands, German infants tended not to copy his unusual way of turning on a novel lighting device: using his head. However, if the model acted competently, confidently putting shoes on his feet, babies tended to copy the model and used their heads to activate the novel lighting device. Later, by age three, a substantial amount of work shows that children not only track and use competence in their immediate cultural learning but retain this information to selectively target their future learning in multiple domains. For example, young children will note who knows the “correct linguistic labels for common objects (like “ducks”), use this information for targeting their learning about both novel tools or words, and then remember this competence information for a week, using it to preferentially learn new things from the previously more competent model.