cross-cultural; cumulative culture; innovation; overimitation; sex differences; tool-use; Multidisciplinary
Abstract :
[en] Children are skilful at acquiring tool-using skills by faithfully copying relevant and irrelevant actions performed by others, but poor at innovating tools to solve problems. Five- to twelve-year-old urban French and rural Serbian children (N = 208) were exposed to a Hook task; a jar containing a reward in a bucket and a pipe cleaner as potential recovering tool material. In both countries, few children under the age of 10 made a hook from the pipe cleaner to retrieve the reward on their own. However, from five onward, the majority of unsuccessful children succeeded after seeing an adult model manufacturing a hook without completing the task. Additionally, a third of the children who observed a similar demonstration including an irrelevant action performed with a second object, a string, replicated this meaningless action. Children's difficulty with innovation and early capacity for overimitation thus do not depend on socio-economic background. Strikingly, we document a sex difference in overimitation across cultures, with boys engaging more in overimitation than girls, a finding that may result from differences regarding explorative tool-related behaviour. This male-biased sex effect sheds new light on our understanding of overimitation, and more generally, on how human tool culture evolved.
Disciplines :
Social, industrial & organizational psychology
Author, co-author :
Frick, Aurélien ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Département des sciences cliniques ; Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK ; Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, Suor Orsola Benincasa University, Naples, Italy
Clément, Fabrice; Cognitive Science Centre, University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland
Gruber, Thibaud; Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland ; Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Language :
English
Title :
Evidence for a sex effect during overimitation: boys copy irrelevant modelled actions more than girls across cultures.
People Programme SNF - Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung
Funding text :
The research leading to these results has received funding from the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) and from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development, and demonstration under REA grant agreement no. 329197 awarded to T.G. During the writing of this article, A.F. was supported by a doctoral scholarship from Suor Orsola Benincasa University, and T.G. was supported by an Interdisciplinary Project CR13I1_162720/1 grant and an Advanced Postdoc. Mobility fellowship P300PA_164678/1 from the Swiss National Science Foundation.Ethics. A written parental consent was obtained for each child and the research project and protocols were reviewed and accepted by the Ethics Committee at the University of Neuchâtel as well as the participating schools. Data accessibility. The data that support the findings of this study are available through the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/2e86d [57]. Authors’ contributions. A.F. and F.C. conceived and designed the study. A.F. collected and coded the data. A.F. and T.G. analysed the data. A.F., T.G. and F.C. wrote the paper. All authors reviewed and approved the final manuscript. Competing interests. We have no competing interests. Funding. The research leading to these results has received funding from the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) and from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development, and demonstration under REA grant agreement no. 329197 awarded to T.G. During the writing of this article, A.F. was supported by a doctoral scholarship from Suor Orsola Benincasa University, and T.G. was supported by an Interdisciplinary Project CR13I1_162720/1 grant and an Advanced Postdoc. Mobility fellowship P300PA_164678/1 from the Swiss National Science Foundation. Acknowledgements. A.F. wishes to thank particularly Linda Livingstone and Katarina Živkovic for data collection in Serbia, Emilie Sandrin for the double coding and inter-reliability index, Nicolas Chevalier, Diane Austry and
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