AnimalTeach: Investigating How Children Reengage in Learning Contexts

AnimalTeach examines the behavioural strategies children use to gain novel information within observational and instructional learning contexts. This study can tell us more about the active role children play in maximising the benefits of teaching scenarios for their own learning. To investigate this, we will provide children with either an observational learning or an instructional learning context in which they learn a new piece of information from an adult. This information is critical for succeeding in an instrumental game that both the adult and child are playing. The adult either expresses an intention to share this information with the child through the use of direct eye gaze and communicative verbal cues, or they do not express any intention to share this information with the child (indicated by averted eye gaze and neutral verbal cues). We will also manipulate how visible the new information is for children. For some trials, the adult displays this new information visibly in front of the child. In other trials, this information is concealed from the child behind an opaque barrier. We then examine how children’s behaviour changes when this information is visible versus concealed from their view. This project seeks to identify behavioural strategies children might use to regain this information on concealed trials– whether it be through reengaging adults to share that information (e.g. through verbal communication or gesture), or finding alternative observational learning strategies in order to gain access to that information (e.g. changing their own viewpoint). We hypothesise that children’s behavioural strategies will vary according to cultural norms about acceptable ways for children to learn information from others. Broadly, these expectations fit into generalised schemas of parenting that emphasise different qualities. For instance, in many hunter-gatherer communities, children are socialized to be autonomous and egalitarian (Hewlett, 2016). Here, direct pedagogy (teaching) is uncommon, and children most frequently learn by observational learning (Boyette & Hewlett, 2018). In contrast, children in agricultural communities and more industrialised societies in the West tend to emphasise obedience and assertiveness (Brown, 2011), and direct pedagogy or instruction is common. We predict that children from a traditionally hunter-gatherer community in Namibia will display different behavioural strategies from children living in a Western, industrialised society in Germany. To test this hypothesis, we will recruit 4-year-old to 9-year-old children from Akhoe Hai||om communities in Namibia. We will also recruit 4 - to 7- year-old children in Germany. We will examine variation in the kinds of behaviours exhibited by children within each community.