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Learning from others - Coggle Diagram
Learning from others
Dyadic Relationships
Understanding Intentions
For example, judging whether an object is not handed over due to inability or unwillingness requires an understanding of intentions. Infants as young as 9months show signs of being able ti distinguish between the two.
Facial expressions and vocal affect can 'leak' emotional states and so serve as social signals with no intention by the signaller to do so.
Over-imitation
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Children from 14months up to early teens can copy actions with high accuracy, this can still happen in adults.
Children will not just copy parts that help towards the goal of an action but all specific components modelled, in experiments.
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Why it is interesting.
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Over-imitation is particularly pronounced when the goal is already known, which makes the idiosyncratic action style more socially relevant.
The bigger picture
Mechanisms like over-imitation put emphasis on seemingly redundant, intricate details.
This might be an important puzzle piece in understanding how norms and conventions of society are learned.
It might also be pivotal for language acquisition, with so much in speech and language being arbitrary.
Clinical implications
Children with autism do not over-imitate. One could speculate that this might be one reason why some clinical populations will be less likely to acquire subtle cultural norms and conventions.
Imitating
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Mirror neurons may be able to explain theory of mind skills and support the idea that perception and action are directly linked.
Imitation is an important tool along the lifespan, and can explain the emergence of various behaviours, e.g. aggression.
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Recognising Individuals
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Evolutionarily physical strength was once the most important factor for moving up in a group. This has changed and therefore so has the prominence on cognitive ability.
Our sophisticated social organisations build on being able to recognise someone and remember what he or she has done for us in the past. This is part of our declarative memory.
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Triadic Relationships
Communicative Intentions
Understanding that others have communicative intentions is just one step up from perceiving others as intentional agents. Here the child learns that - and how - others use language and other, nonverbal communication to achieve (shared) goals.
Social Referencing
Infants' tend to look for signals from the caregivers when faced with unfamiliar objects or situations, this is social referencing. The interpretation/appraisal of a situation is socially driven like everything else.
Joint Attention
Increased attention to objects that are the focus of joint attention emerges at 0;9. First adult-led, later also infant-led.
Joint attention helps to link verbal output to entities in the world, and plays a big role in discerning the communicative intention of others.
Facilitated be social signals such as eye gaze, facial expression and vocal affect.
Clinical Implications
For children with Autism and Down Syndrome the amount of joint engagement with others is an especially important predictor of language-learning outcomes.
Interestingly this advantage is particularly strong when caregivers shift their own attention to match the child's focus.
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Gaze Following
At 10 months old infants are more likely to follow the head movements of a person with open eyes than a person with closed eyes.
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It all starts with infants perceiving the direction of another person's gaze which signals what the current focus of that person's visual attention is.
Moving from dyadic to triadic relationships facilitates progress from direct subjective experiences with the caregiver to communication with others about something in the world.
The end goal of all of this is referential communication - pivotal for human exchanging information and cooperation.
The ability to learn from other, to learn by observing, is an important prerequisite for latent learning. - Latent learning that is not reinforced and not demonstrated until there is motivation to do so.
Learning from others is also heavily utilised for off-line learning methods like vicarious learning - where the idea is that you can learn simply by watching somebody else do it, typically in video clips or cartoons.