Young children ’ s selective learning of rule games from reliable and unreliable models

We investigated preschoolers’ selective learning from models that had previously appeared to be reliable or unreliable. Replicating previous research, children from 4 years selectively learned novel words from reliable over unreliable speakers. Extending previous research, children also selectively learned other kinds of acts – novel games – from reliable actors. More important, – and novel to this study, this selective learning was not just based on a preference for one model or one kind of act, but had a normative dimension to it. Children understood the way a reliable actor demonstrated an act not only as the better one, but as the normatively appropriate or correct one, as indicated in both their explicit verbal comments and their spontaneous normative interventions (e.g., protest, critique) in response to third-party acts deviating from the one demonstrated. These findings are discussed in the broader context of the development of children’s social cognition and cultural learning.  Much of what we know and do we have learned from others. This process of cultural learning has its roots in earliest infancy, when imitation begins. From the second year, infants begin to imitatively learn instrumental, playful, symbolic and other kinds of acts from adults (Carpenter, Nagell, & Tomasello, 1998; Casler & Kelemen, 2005; Gergely, Bekkering, & Király, 2002; Meltzoff, 1995). When imitating others, even young children seem not to be confined to re-enact merely idiosyncratic intentional acts of an individual. Rather, they learn something about general forms of actions, with such forms being structured by normative dimensions of appropriate and inappropriate performance. An indirect indicator of such an understanding can be seen, for example, in the phenomenon of functional fixedness: ∗ Corresponding author at: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany. Tel.: +49 341 3550 449; fax: +49 341 3550 444. E-mail address: rakoczy@eva.mpg.de (H. Rakoczy). 0885-2014/$ – see front matter  Cognitive Development 24 (2009) 61–69 When children from 2 years see someone use a novel object systematically in an instrumental way, they not only use the object in similar ways themselves later on, but only use it for this purpose and assume other people will do so as well (Casler & Kelemen, 2005). On a rich interpretation, this could be taken to show that children not only understand what the other person was up to, but also understand how one appropriately acts with the tool because that is what it is for. While such a rich reading of the functional fixedness data is not necessarily warranted (children could fixate on a way of treating the object they merely see as usual, but not necessarily as normatively licensed), recent work has documented children’s learning of novel acts with normative structure in more direct ways. In a set of studies (Rakoczy, 2008; Rakoczy, Warneken, & Tomasello, 2008), young children (age 2 and 3) first saw an experimenter demonstrate a novel simple rule game (called, e.g., “daxing”). In the course of this demonstration, the experimenter performed two kinds of acts, one of which was marked as the proper game (“This is daxing”), while the other one was marked as an accident (“Whoops!”). Subsequently, children not only learned to play the game imitatively themselves; they also indicated that they understood the demonstrated way to play the game as the normatively correct one by criticizing third parties that announced their participation in “daxing” and then performed inappropriate acts. This normative understanding, furthermore, involves some basic sensitivity to the context of the actions: In one control condition, when the model performed the same kinds of behaviours but these were all neutrally marked (as unspecific acts), children did not jump to any normative conclusions and did not criticize third parties. In another control condition, the demonstration and the act of the third party were exactly alike, but the announcement of the third party was different: She announced that she did not want to participate in the game (and thus her subsequent act did not constitute a mistake). Obviously taking this announcement into account, children now did not criticize her. Young preschoolers thus are not only social learners; they are also normative learners in rudimentary form. But how sophisticated and specific are young children’s abilities to engage in cultural normative learning? In particular, apart from some rudimentary context-specificity (mentioned above), how systematic and selective is young children’s learning of normatively structured activities from others? Selectivity in learning from different kinds of models has been the focus of much recent research in social cognitive development (for overviews, see Koenig & Harris, 2005a). Numerous studies have revealed that children from around 3 to 4 take into account different properties of models when having to select between two models in novel word learning situations. First, children are sensitive to expressions of knowledge versus ignorance, preferring knowledgeable models over ignorant ones (Koenig & Harris, 2005b; Studies 2 and 3; Sabbagh & Baldwin, 2001, Study 1). Second, children take into account expressed (un-) certainty and confidence, selectively trusting confident and certain models (Birch, Frampton, & Akmal, 2006; Matsui, Yamamoto, & McCagg, 2006; Moore, Bryant, & Furrow, 1989; Sabbagh & Baldwin, 2001; Study 2). Third, children prefer adult over peer models when learning novel words (Jaswal & Neely, 2006). Fourth, children have been found to differentiate between models of varying degrees of familiarity, preferring more familiar ones (e.g., caregivers at their own day-care center) over less familiar ones (caregivers from other day-care centers; Corriveau, Pasquini, & Harris, 2006). Finally, the best-documented achievement of preschoolers is their ability to track and take into account the varying reliability of different agents. When children first witness two agents one of whom proves reliable in naming familiar objects while the other proves unreliable, and then can choose between the two agents in learning novel words for novel objects, 4-year-olds (and sometimes 3-year-olds) prefer the previously reliable agent (Clément, Koenig, & Harris, 2004; Jaswal & Neely, 2006; Koenig & Harris, 2005b; Koenig, Clément, & Harris, 2004; Pasquini, Corriveau, Koenig, & Harris, 2007). What becomes clear from this line of research is that young preschoolers differentiate between models and tend to prefer reliable, adult, confident and knowledgeable models over unreliable, peer, unconfident and ignorant models when learning novel words. But it is not totally clear what this preference indicates: Do children think that one model is more competent and knows the correct answer to culturally relevant questions? Or is their preference – though prompted by the models’ indications of competence and knowledge – simpler, such that they merely like one model more and thus prefer to follow her? In other words: Do the indications of competence make the model simply H. Rakoczy et al. / Cognitive Development 24 (2009) 61–69 63 more attractive to the child? While the latter possibility does not seem highly plausible on the face of it, arguably it cannot be ruled out, in particular in light of the findings with regard to model familiarity: Given that children show a similar pattern of preference for familiar over unfamiliar models, this might put into question the claim that the preference for the reliable over unreliable models is in fact based on estimations of competence (versus differential sympathy). In sum, then, preschool children have been shown to be cultural normative learners: Not only do they learn through imitation, but they learn from adult models normatively structured forms of action – how one performs them correctly. (This becomes clearest in children’s protest against third party mistakes.) But we do not know how systematic and specific such normative learning is. Yet preschoolers have been shown to be systematic and selective in their learning of words from others, preferring for example reliable over unreliable models. Several questions, however, remain unanswered. First, we do not yet know exactly what this selectivity is based on. Second, we do not know how general this selectivity is – virtually all existing studies so far have looked at linguistic learning only (of sortals or labels of object function; the sole exceptions are studies by Koenig and Harris (2005b; Study 3) and by Birch, Vauthier, and Bloom (in press) that looked at object functions and allowed children to answer verbally or by re-enacting a demonstrated function. Third, and in particular, we do not know yet whether children view the way of doing something they selectively imitate from reliable models in normative terms – as the appropriate way to do it. The present work, therefore, aims at addressing these questions by bringing together the two lines of inquiry on children’s selective learning and on their normative learning. Toward this aim, children’s selective acquisition of normatively structured activities (beyond only linguistic learning) from differentially reliable models was studied. Pilot work suggested that selective learning extends beyond the domain of word learning and could be found on a comparable scale in the domain of playing games. When confronted with two characters (one of them previously reliable, the other previously unreliable) who played a game in different ways, children at 4 years of age selectively played the game in the way the previously reliable model did. In this pilot work, however, in a second phase, when a third p