A shared "optimal-level of arousal": Seeking basis for creativity and curiosity.

We argue that the phases identified in the novelty-seeking model can be clarified by considering an updated version of the optimal-level of arousal model, which incorporates the "arousal" and "mood changing" potentials of stimuli and contexts. Such a model provides valuable insights into what determines one's state of mind, inter-individual differences, and the rewarding effects of curiosity and creativity.

The development and diversity of religious cognition and behavior: Protocol for Wave 1 data collection with children and parents by the Developing Belief Network.

The Developing Belief Network is a consortium of researchers studying human development in diverse social-cultural settings, with a focus on the interplay between general cognitive development and culturally specific processes of socialization and cultural transmission in early and middle childhood. The current manuscript describes the study protocol for the network's first wave of data collection, which aims to explore the development and diversity of religious cognition and behavior. This work is guided by three key research questions: (1) How do children represent and reason about religious and supernatural agents? (2) How do children represent and reason about religion as an aspect of social identity? (3) How are religious and supernatural beliefs transmitted within and between generations? The protocol is designed to address these questions via a set of nine tasks for children between the ages of 4 and 10 years, a comprehensive survey completed by their parents/caregivers, and a task designed to elicit conversations between children and caregivers. This study is being conducted in 39 distinct cultural-religious groups (to date), spanning 17 countries and 13 languages. In this manuscript, we provide detailed descriptions of all elements of this study protocol, give a brief overview of the ways in which this protocol has been adapted for use in diverse religious communities, and present the final, English-language study materials for 6 of the 39 cultural-religious groups who are currently being recruited for this study: Protestant Americans, Catholic Americans, American members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Jewish Americans, Muslim Americans, and religiously unaffiliated Americans.

Tinkering to innovation: How children refine tools over multiple attempts.

The human capacity for technological innovation and creative problem-solving far surpasses that of any species but develops quite late. Prior work has typically presented children with problems requiring a single solution, a limited number of resources, and a limited amount of time. Such tasks do not allow children to utilize one of their strengths: their ability to engage in broad search and exploration. Thus, we hypothesized that a more open-ended innovation task might allow children to demonstrate greater innovative capacity by allowing them to discover and refine a solution over multiple attempts. Children were recruited from a museum and a children's science event in the United Kingdom. We presented 129 children (66 girls, M = 6.91, SD = 2.18) between 4 and 12 years old with a variety of materials and asked children to use those materials to create tools to remove rewards from a box within 10 min. We coded the variety of tools children created each time they attempted to remove the rewards. By comparing successive attempts, we were able to obtain insights about how children built successful tools. Consistent with prior research, we found that older children were more likely than younger children to create successful tools. However, controlling for age, children who engaged in more tinkering-who retained a greater proportion of objects from their failed tools in subsequent attempts and who added more novel objects to their tools following failure-were more likely to build successful tools than children who did not. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The ontogeny of selective social learning: Young children flexibly adopt majority- or payoff-based biases depending on task uncertainty.

Humans have adapted well to diverse environments in part because of their ability to efficiently acquire information from their social environment. However, we still know very little as to how young children acquire cultural knowledge and in particular the circumstances under which children prioritize social learning over asocial learning. In this study, we asked whether children will selectively adopt either a majority-biased or payoff-biased social learning strategy in the presence or absence of asocial learning. The 3- to 5-year-olds (N = 117) were first shown a video in which four other children took turns in retrieving a capsule housing a reward from one of two boxes. Three of the children (the "majority") retrieved a capsule from the same box, and a single individual (the "minority") retrieved a capsule from the alternative box. Across four conditions, we manipulated both the value of the rewards available in each box (equal or unequal payoff) and whether children had knowledge of the payoff before making their own selection. Results show that children adopted a majority-biased learning strategy when they were unaware of the value of the rewards available but adopted a payoff-biased strategy when the payoff was known to be unequal. We conclude that children are strategic social learners who integrate both social and asocial learning to maximize personal gain.

When does it pay to follow the crowd? Children optimize imitation of causally irrelevant actions performed by a majority.

Cultural evolutionary theory posits that human cultural complexity rests on a set of adaptive learning biases that help to guide functionality and optimality in social learning, but this sits in contrast with the commonly held view that children are unselective "over-imitators." Here, we tested whether 4- and 6-year-old children use social learning biases flexibly to fine-tune their copying of irrelevant actions. Children watched a video of a majority demonstrating causally irrelevant actions and a minority demonstrating only causally relevant actions. In one condition observers approved of the majority and disapproved of the minority, and in the other condition observers watched the majority and minority neutrally. Results showed that both 4- and 6-year-olds copied the inefficient majority more often than the efficient minority when the observers had approved of the majority's actions, but they copied the efficient minority significantly more when the observers had watched neutrally. We discuss the implications of children's optimal selectivity in copying and the importance of integrating social approval into majority-biased learning when acquiring norms and conventions and in broader processes of cultural evolution.

The child's pantheon: Children's hierarchical belief structure in real and non-real figures.

To what extent do children believe in real, unreal, natural and supernatural figures relative to each other, and to what extent are features of culture responsible for belief? Are some figures, like Santa Claus or an alien, perceived as more real than figures like Princess Elsa or a unicorn? We categorized 13 figures into five a priori categories based on 1) whether children receive direct evidence of the figure's existence, 2) whether children receive indirect evidence of the figure's existence, 3) whether the figure was associated with culture-specific rituals or norms, and 4) whether the figure was explicitly presented as fictional. We anticipated that the categories would be endorsed in the following order: 'Real People' (a person known to the child, The Wiggles), 'Cultural Figures' (Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny, The Tooth Fairy), 'Ambiguous Figures' (Dinosaurs, Aliens), 'Mythical Figures' (unicorns, ghosts, dragons), and 'Fictional Figures' (Spongebob Squarepants, Princess Elsa, Peter Pan). In total, we analysed responses from 176 children (aged 2-11 years) and 56 adults for 'how real' they believed 13 individual figures were (95 children were examined online by their parents, and 81 children were examined by trained research assistants). A cluster analysis, based exclusively on children's 'realness' scores, revealed a structure supporting our hypotheses, and multilevel regressions revealed a sensible hierarchy of endorsement with differing developmental trajectories for each category of figures. We advance the argument that cultural rituals are a special form of testimony that influences children's reality/fantasy distinctions, and that rituals and norms for 'Cultural Figures' are a powerful and under-researched factor in generating and sustaining a child's endorsement for a figure's reality status. All our data and materials are publically available at https://osf.io/wurxy/.

A Diverse and Flexible Teaching Toolkit Facilitates the Human Capacity for Cumulative Culture.

Human culture is uniquely complex compared to other species. This complexity stems from the accumulation of culture over time through high- and low-fidelity transmission and innovation. One possible reason for why humans retain and create culture, is our ability to modulate teaching strategies in order to foster learning and innovation. We argue that teaching is more diverse, flexible, and complex in humans than in other species. This particular characteristic of human teaching rather than teaching itself is one of the reasons for human's incredible capacity for cumulative culture. That is, humans unlike other species can signal to learners whether the information they are teaching can or cannot be modified. As a result teaching in humans can be used to support high or low fidelity transmission, innovation, and ultimately, cumulative culture.

The Development of Selective Copying: Children's Learning From an Expert Versus Their Mother.

This study tested the prediction that, with age, children should rely less on familiarity and more on expertise in their selective social learning. Experiment 1 (N = 50) found that 5- to 6-year-olds copied the technique their mother used to extract a prize from a novel puzzle box, in preference to both a stranger and an established expert. This bias occurred despite children acknowledging the expert model's superior capability. Experiment 2 (N = 50) demonstrated a shift in 7- to 8-year-olds toward copying the expert. Children aged 9-10 years did not copy according to a model bias. The findings of a follow-up study (N = 30) confirmed that, instead, they prioritized their own-partially flawed-causal understanding of the puzzle box.

Do Children Copy an Expert or a Majority? Examining Selective Learning in Instrumental and Normative Contexts.

This study examined whether instrumental and normative learning contexts differentially influence 4- to 7-year-old children's social learning strategies; specifically, their dispositions to copy an expert versus a majority consensus. Experiment 1 (N = 44) established that children copied a relatively competent "expert" individual over an incompetent individual in both kinds of learning context. In experiment 2 (N = 80) we then tested whether children would copy a competent individual versus a majority, in each of the two different learning contexts. Results showed that individual children differed in strategy, preferring with significant consistency across two different test trials to copy either the competent individual or the majority. This study is the first to show that children prefer to copy more competent individuals when shown competing methods of achieving an instrumental goal (Experiment 1) and provides new evidence that children, at least in our "individualist" culture, may consistently express either a competency or majority bias in learning both instrumental and normative information (Experiment 2). This effect was similar in the instrumental and normative learning contexts we applied.

"Model age-based" and "copy when uncertain" biases in children's social learning of a novel task.

Theoretical models of social learning predict that individuals can benefit from using strategies that specify when and whom to copy. Here the interaction of two social learning strategies, model age-based biased copying and copy when uncertain, was investigated. Uncertainty was created via a systematic manipulation of demonstration efficacy (completeness) and efficiency (causal relevance of some actions). The participants, 4- to 6-year-old children (N=140), viewed both an adult model and a child model, each of whom used a different tool on a novel task. They did so in a complete condition, a near-complete condition, a partial demonstration condition, or a no-demonstration condition. Half of the demonstrations in each condition incorporated causally irrelevant actions by the models. Social transmission was assessed by first responses but also through children's continued fidelity, the hallmark of social traditions. Results revealed a bias to copy the child model both on first response and in continued interactions. Demonstration efficacy and efficiency did not affect choice of model at first response but did influence solution exploration across trials, with demonstrations containing causally irrelevant actions decreasing exploration of alternative methods. These results imply that uncertain environments can result in canalized social learning from specific classes of model.

The circle of life: A cross-cultural comparison of children's attribution of life-cycle traits.

Do children attribute mortality and other life-cycle traits to all minded beings? The present study examined whether culture influences young children's ability to conceptualize and differentiate human beings from supernatural beings (such as God) in terms of life-cycle traits. Three-to-5-year-old Israeli and British children were questioned whether their mother, a friend, and God would be subject to various life-cycle processes: Birth, death, ageing, existence/longevity, and parentage. Children did not anthropomorphize but differentiated among human and supernatural beings, attributing life-cycle traits to humans, but not to God. Although 3-year-olds differentiated significantly among agents, 5-year-olds attributed correct life-cycle traits more consistently than younger children. The results also indicated some cross-cultural variation in these attributions. Implications for biological conceptual development are discussed.