Social Learning Flashcards
What is social learning?
Learning through cues provided by other social agents
What is non-social learning?
Learning from the inanimate environment
What is special about children’s social learning?
Social learning enables cumulative culture: changes are incorporated into the repertoire + transferred across generations
What is social learning good for?
- Babies have a lot to learn fast
- Sometimes they learn passively + sometimes by being taught by others
- SL is important for learning about social conventions which vary across time
What can you learn from social learning?
Learning can be about:
- Properties of individual things: “scissors are sharp”
- Relations between things: “scissors + paper go together but scissors + potatoes don’t”
- Relations between things and actions (cause - effect): “hold scissors, open scissors with paper in middle, close scissors, paper is split”
- Social conventions: “it is rude to not/slurp while eating”
Describe Piaget’s theory of social learning
- Children’s behavioural + mental capacities expand as their cognitive skills develop with age
- Child is an individual scientist, exploring the world
- Cognitive skills are individual characteristics
- Even infants use others as source of info
- Egocentrism first: Children can’t put themselves in other people’s shoes until pre-operational stage (2-7 years)
- Learnt behaviours can’t be easily transferred to other domains until formal operations stage (11+ years)
Describe vygotsky’s theory of social learning
- Children’s behavioural + mental capacities develop through social interaction
- Social interactions give children the ‘tools’ of learning + thinking
- SL is the primary form of knowledge production
- A piece of knowledge, a behavioural pattern or an idea is first constructed within a social interaction, and then is internalised by the individual
- Language is an important tool for developing mental capacities
Describe Bandura’s theory of social learning
- Emphasis on who children learn from
Identification processes on basis of: - Adopting behaviours
- Symbolic representation
- Similar meaning systems
Bandura claimed gender-related behaviours are socially learnt
Bobo doll experiment: children, especially boys, imitated aggressive behaviour
Later empirical studies partially supported his theory:
- Children are influenced by what they observe + imitate
- But children also act in line with their social identity + gender schemas
What are the 2 mechanisms of social learning?
- Learning through observation
- Learning through imitation
Mechanisms of social learning: Observation
- Can be done while being actively taught or passively while watching
Relies on associative learning mechanisms:
-X and Y tend to co-occur…
-Evolutionary ancient mechanism - Useful in early development, before children develop motor skills necessary to execute the actions themselves
- In experiments, need to ensure the target behaviour is something the child can’t do, otherwise can’t be sure if its learning through observation or trial + error
Describe the experiments about learning to feed through social observation
- 6 month-olds (n=54), 10 month olds (n=54), adults (n=32)
- Infants’ predictive eye gaze is tracked as they watch videos of an adult
Expt 1- Feeding action - manual vs self-propelled
Expt 2- Combing action - unfamiliar compared to feeding
How well can infants anticipate the goal of the action?
Describe experiment 1 of learning to feed through social observation
Infants watched videos of an adult feeding either by moving the spoon herself (manual) or with the spoon ‘flying’ into her mouth (self-propelled)
Describe experiment 2 of learning to feed through social observation
Infants watched videos of an adult either feeding herself (familiar action) or combing her hair (unfamiliar action)
Explain the results from the experiments about learning to feed through social observation
- Both 6mo and 10mo infants predicted the outcome of a manual feeding action
- Only 10mo infants predicted the outcome of a self-propelled feeding action
- Neither 6mo or 10mo infants predicted the outcome of combing action
Therefore, the more infants observe an action, the better they learn its outcome
What is imitation?
Imitation: First observing another person + then copying their actions
- Relies on the ability to perceive others’ actions + map them onto one’s own body
