Detecting social transmission in the design of artifacts

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

Children grow up surrounded by human-made objects (artifacts). These artifacts are useful not only as tools, but also as a constant source of social information -- conveying information about the traits and social identities of people who own them, choose them, or create them. The project will address how children and adults learn about other people based upon the objects those people design or create (a capacity known as "intuitive archeology"). The project will also address how this reasoning develops over childhood. Understanding the social world is one of the most important challenges of early cognitive development, as social cognition forms a foundation for everything from learning language to later academic success. Failure to understand one's social environment, as in the case of Autism Spectrum Disorder, leads to significant impairments in multiple domains of life. Researchers will examine how people use artifacts as a source of social information by identifying and explaining underlying reasoning processes. This work will enhance understanding of a novel aspect of social reasoning, which in turn, will facilitate designing future interventions for atypical social cognitive development. This work will also enhance understanding of the role of social cognition as a foundation for positive outcomes in typical development (academic success, and healthy social relationships). In addition to these societal impacts, the project also involves training graduate students on all aspects of research, including experimental and computational modeling techniques. Intuitive archeological reasoning will be examined. Artifacts' designs are a combination of socially transmitted ideas (copied or learned from others), and independently generated ideas (for example, facing a similar problem can lead two people to independently create similar tools). Reasoning about social transmission serves as the foundation for many other social inferences, such as inferring a person's likely social and cultural group membership. Thus, researchers will first develop a computational model based on Bayesian inference to explain how people decide whether social transmission of ideas has occurred when observing the design of artifacts. Second, researchers will examine age-related change in how children use rich, explanation-based reasoning to judge whether social transmission has occurred. In the first set of experiments, researchers will ask both adults and children to infer whether one person copied another (a kind of social transmission) when designing a simple tool. In the second set of experiments, researchers will ask for judgments of copying and social transmission in a more complex artifact design task. Children of various ages as well as adults will be tested; their patterns of responses will be compared to the predictions of computational models (of explanation-based reasoning, and simpler perceptual heuristics). By combining formal computational modeling with behavioral experiments across childhood, the researchers will assess how children develop the ability to reason and how this ability changes with age. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.