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Social learning and atypical development - Coggle Diagram
Social learning and atypical development
Different levels of learning
Individual stimuli
child looking at action of an adult
e.g., 'scissors are sharp'
Relations among stimuli
learning that different things go together
e.g., when an adult holds scissors, they also hold paper
scissors and paper go together, but scissors and potatoes don't
Relations between stimuli and responses
(actions and outcomes)
“hold scissors, open scissors with paper in the middle of the blades, close scissors, paper splits into two pieces”
Social learning
Babies need to learn a lot very quickly
trying the get as much info from surroundings as possible
passive - watching, observing
active - parents teaching them
Enables cumulative culture
changes incorporated into repertoire and transferred across generations
Core component of human culture
Enables acquisition of:
material information, e.g how to open a box
gestures, e.g. dancing
rituals, e.g, birthday celebrations
Learning through imitation
First observing an action, then coping their actions
Relies on ability to perceive others actions and map them onto their own body
Emulation
Copying the end goal of an action, rather than style of action
More flexible
Imitation vs emulation
Gergely et al. (2002)
14mo infants
hands occupied, hands free conditions
Infants watch adult switch light on with their head
Results
Hands occupied - most used hands
Hands free - most used head
Conclusion
imitated
adult model if the adult was
free
to do that action
emulated
adult model if there was a
reason
the adult did the action
irrationally
Infants imitation takes into account action rationality and model's goal
Deciding who to imitate
(Rakoczy et al)
Both 4yo and 5yo
imitate reliable puppet
more
Children
choose
to learn new object labels from
reliable
puppet
From at least 4yo, children
selectively imitate
a model when learning about social norms.
Learning through observation
Can be active or passive
Relies on associative learning mechanisms
Useful for child to learn the skills before developing the motor skills
Can be examined with habituation
Learning to feed through social observation
Kochukova & Gredeback (2010)
6mo, 10mo and adults
looked at infants
predictive eye gaze
2 experiments
feeding action - manual vs self propelled
combing action - unfamiliar compared to feeding
How well can the infants anticipate the goal of the action
Fixation at the area of interest before the action occurs = prediction
Experiment 1
Infants watched videos of adult feeding either by:
moving the spoon herself
with the spoon ‘flying’ into her mouth.
will infants predict the food will land in the mouth?
Experiment 2
Infants watched videos of an adult either feeding herself or combing her hair.
Results
All ages predicted outcome of manual feeding from eye gaze
10mo and adults predicted outcome of self-propelled, but 6mo old didn’t
6mo and 10mo didn’t predict outcome of combing action
the more an infant observes an action, better they learn the outcome
Culture-specific learning through social observation
Green et al. (2016)
8mo Swedish & Chinese infants
Same design, only difference - eating with a spoon or chopsticks
Results
Swedish infants could
not
predict outcome with chopsticks,
could
with spoon
Chinese infants could only just predict outcome of spoon
Conclusion
Infants social learning is specific to their cultural influence
More they observe actions, better they learn the outcome
Social vs non-social learning
Social learning
learning through cues and provided by a social agent
Non-social learning
learning through inanimate environment
Atypical development
Potential reasons for differences
cognitive impairments
social impairments
sensory/motor impairments
Autism
Over-imitation - copying irrational actions
Children with autism tend to under-imitate
may be due to lack of social motivation
understanding cause-effect relationships of actions may be impaired in ASD
Marsh et al.
Autistic (ASD), ADHD and typically developed (TD) children
5 over-imitation tasks
check rationality discrimination
Results
ASD couldn't discriminate between rational and irrational actions as well
This effect held even after controlling for rationality discrimination scores.
Mechanisms of social learning
Learning through observation
Learning through imitation