The establishment of long-term knowledge base intertwins with the acquisition of cultural knowledge. The acquisition of shared, cultural knowledge demands that a) already young children should be able to recognize what is shared knowledge; b) already in the phase of acquisition children should be able to select information with respect to its potential relevance in relation to shared, cultural knowledge.
10. thesis. The emotional and affiliative motives behind social categorization are preceded by a cognitive, epistemic function of identifying culturally
knowledgeable individuals both for (1) acquiring knowledge, and (2) obtaining access to and maintaining a shared representational space in the service of successful interactions.
Researchers in various fields of cognitive science have suggested that the human mind has evolved a special module to form and represent social categories (Spelke and Kinzler, 2007; Sperber and Hirschfeld, 2004). The open question is what the main function of such mechanism can be that is sensitive to any, even arbitrary grouping cues, yet is used immediately and dynamically at the same time.
37 To become a competent member of a culture one must be able to conform to the behavioural norms of that particular culture and possess culturally shared knowledge.
Acquiring this knowledge is essential for successful social interactions. There is no information inherent to skin colour that would provide guidance in how to adjust our behaviour in interactions, rather such adjustments are related to cultural background.
Identifying members of one’s own cultural group is of special relevance during cultural transmission. Thus, naïve sociology, social categorization may play a role in cultural transmission, as it helps infants to select culturally knowledgeable and reliable sources of information (see also Kinzler et al, 2012).
We argue that any behavioural cue that indicates that a person shares the knowledge space of the target group/culture will lead infants to categorize that person as “in-group” which, in turn, will necessarily induce an epistemic trust (accept that person as a valuable information source and consequently suspend other individual learning strategies) towards any information that person may manifest later on, even if that is not yet part of the perceivers knowledge base.
11. thesis. Cultural knowledge represents an organized system. Supposedly, children understand that an attributed knowledge base might cover and unite different domains. Based on this, we hypothesize that children are able to form unified expectations induced by different cues on the background knowledge of a partner.
We propose that young children are sensitive to the cues - like tool use or language use - that reliably reflect the borders of shared knowledge and are able to build up common semantic categories of social groups with the help of integrating information induced by different ‘knowledge’ cues. The expectation of such integrated shared knowledge base should influence children’s behavioral expectations as well.
An eye-tracking paradigm was designed to test whether two-year-old children differentially associate conventional versus non-conventional tool use with language-use, reflecting an organization of information that is induced by cues of shared knowledge. The results of the study suggest that children take the conventionality of behavior into account in forming representations about a person, and they generalize to other qualities of the person based on this information.
12. thesis. Naïve sociology contributes to the flexibility of social learning: when
38 receiving a novel piece of information from a carrier of shared knowledge (e.g.
cultural group), that piece of information is treated as part of the culturally shared representational space that the child intends to acquire.
Our aims also included the exploration of how young children reason about social categories, and how this reasoning is reflected in their willingness to learn from agents of certain social groups. Three studies of ours suggest that young children are sensitive to the borders of culturally shared knowledge and confirm that social categorization in early childhood serves epistemic purposes, children selectively endorse information received form cultural in-group members.
The first study investigated whether toddlers would selectively imitate the actions of a demonstrator who exhibits familiarity with cultural practices over a demonstrator who consistently deviates from familiar tool-use practices. We propose that the familiarity of a tool using action as a cue serves to point out those potential informants that belong to the same social group as the novice, therefore relying on these signals in selecting teachers ensures that the knowledge obtained is valid within a particular social environment. Results show that 3-year-old children are more willing to copy the actions of the conventionally behaving model. This suggests that by the age of 3, children are adapt at determining whether someone’s knowledge is appropriate within their own social context and thus worth acquiring.
The second study investigated 3-year-old children’s learning processes about object functions. We built on children’s tendency to commit scale errors with tools to explore whether they would selectively endorse object functions from a linguistic in-group over an out-in-group model. Participants were presented with different object sets, and a model speaking either in their native or a foreign language demonstrated how to use the presented tools. In the test phase, children received the object sets with two modifications: the original tool was replaced by one that was too big to achieve the goal but was otherwise identical, and another tool was added to the set that looked different but was appropriately scaled for goal attainment. Children in the Native language condition were significantly more likely to commit scale errors – that is, choose the over-sized tool – than children in the foreign language condition. We propose that these results show that children are more likely to generalize object functions to a category of artifacts following a demonstration from a cultural in-group member.
The third study investigated whether 4-year-olds used language as a cue to social group membership to infer whether the tool-use behavior of a model had to be
39 encoded as indicative of the tool’s function. We built on children’s tendency to treat functions as mutually exclusive, i.e. their propensity to refrain from using the same tool for more than one function. We hypothesized that children would form mutually exclusive tool-function mappings only if the source of the function information is a cultural in-group person, as opposed to an out-group person. Participants were presented with tool-function pairs by a model who previously spoke either in their native or in a foreign language. During the test phase, children encountered new purposes, for what they could either use the demonstrated tools’ color variant or another equally suitable, thus far unseen, alternative tool. In line with our predictions, children preferred to use the alternative tool for the new function only in the cultural in-group condition. The findings suggest that children restrict learning artifact functions from cultural in-group models.