Cultural Transmission of Tool Use in Young Children: A Diffusion Chain Study

By Emma Flynn, Andrew Whiten. 2008

98 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Developmental and gender effects in the transmission of information about a tool-use task were investigated within a ‘diffusion chain’ design. One hundred and twenty-seven children (65 three-year-olds and 62 five-year-olds) participated. Eighty children took part in diffusion chains in which consecutive children in chains of five witnessed two attempts on a tool-use task by the previous child in the chain. Comparisons were made between two experimental conditions in which alternative techniques were seeded and a third no-model control condition. Children in the diffusion chains conformed to the technique they witnessed, in one experimental condition faithfully transmitting a technique absent in the no-model condition. Five-year-olds displayed more robust transmission than three-year-olds, and boys were both more competent and displayed stronger transmission than girls.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/92a94e97c93c2bfe59645da9bfeee811706c33da

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Ritual increases children’s affiliation with in-group members☆ (2016, background): “Overimitationmay be an adaptive human social learning strategy facilitating the rapid social learning of instrumental skills and may be employed at the expense of efficiency (Flynn & Whiten, 2008; Whiten, McGuigan, Marshall-Pescini, & Hopper, 2009).”
Emulation, imitation, over-imitation and the scope of culture for child and chimpanzee (2009, background): “Likewise, only recently has a handful of such studies Imitation and over-imitation A. Whiten et al. 2419 been completed with children (Horner et al. 2006; Flynn 2008; Flynn & Whiten 2008; McGuigan & Graham in press).”
Context-dependent model-based biases in cultural transmission: children's imitation is affected by model age over model knowledge state (2012, background): “Twoaction, artificial fruits tasks have shown that 14-month-old infants (Hanna & Meltzoff, 1993) and 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children (Flynn & Whiten, 2008a; Hopper, Lambeth, Schapiro, & Whiten, 2008; Hopper, Flynn, Wood, & Whiten, 2010) imitate relevant actions performed by a peer to the same…”