Atkinson, M. 1 , Thompson, B. 2 , Renner, E. 1 , Mackintosh, G. 1 , Xie, D. 3 , Su, Y. 3 & Caldwell, C. 1
1 University of Stirling
2 University of California, Berkeley
3 Peking University
It has been proposed that children possess domain-specific mechanisms for social learning, and that these mechanisms function to promote the rapid acquisition of cultural traits. We assess this by comparing children's performance on simple stimulus choice problems when they are provided with information from either a social source or from their own personal experience. Over three experiments, involving both samples of 18-month- to 5-year-old children recruited in Glasgow, Scotland (Study 1; N = 172) and in Beijing, China (Study 2; N = 159), and a variant of Studies 1-2 with a counter-intuitive reward structure (Study 3; N = 184), we find little evidence that children perform differently in response to information acquired from a social source compared to information received via their own individual exploration. Expectations about the predictive value of information thus appear to be independent of source. Furthermore, error rates show evidence of a consistent bias driven by motivation for exploration as well as exploitation, which was apparent across both conditions in all three studies. We conclude that some apparent peculiarities identified in human social information use likely reflect domain-general learning and motivational biases rather than domain-specific enculturation mechanisms.