Children as cultural explorers: How imitation, pedagogy, and selective trust prepare children for learning in the cultural niche
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Human societies have developed over millennia to living in a variety of different social and physical environments, accumulating adaptations too complex and interdependent to be developed independently within the span of a single generation. Thus, every child, as a new member of their culture, must be able to learn from others in order to acquire the knowledge necessary to succeed—and every culture requires its children to be successful social learners for tools, technologies, and beliefs to be transmitted to the next generation. In this chapter, we examine the range of social learning abilities that children are equipped with, and how these capacities facilitate making inferences when faced with ambiguous and complex in- formation. In particular, by combining their capacity for high-fidelity imitation and for understanding others’ intentions and goals, children can not only learn about a variety of physical causal relationships but also about a society’s norms, traditions, and rituals. Children can also form sophisticated and nuanced beliefs about when to trust others’ testimony, and balance the epistemic and normative value of imitating others when their sources disagree on what to believe or how to act. These characteristics, we argue, reflect children’s adaptation to learning within a cultural context, and prompt consideration about the unique role that children may play in cultural learning.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".