This Is How We Do It: Interpreting Sub-Efficient Means Actions of Group Members in Infancy and Childhood

This is how we do it: Interpreting sub-efficient means actions of group members in infancy and childhood Nazlı Altınok Submitted to: Central European University Department of Cognitive Science In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Cognitive Science Primary supervisor: György Gergely Secondary supervisor: Ildikó Király External advisor: Mikołaj Hernik CEU eTD Collection Budapest, Hungary 2020 Declaration of Authorship I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at Central European University or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgment is made in the form of bibliographical reference. The present thesis includes work that has appeared or will appear in the following articles: Altınok, N., Hernik, M., Király, I., & Gergely, G. (2020). Acquiring sub-efficient and efficient variants of novel means by integrating information from multiple social models in preschoolers. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 195, 104847. Altınok, N., Király, I., & Gergely, G. (in preparation). Eighteen-month-olds’ selective imitation of demonstrators who speak the same language as the infant’s social community: Efficiency does not always triumph. Altınok, N., Hernik, M., Király, I., & Gergely, G. (in preparation). Eleven-month-olds expect agents to act efficiently but also to repeat the movements of their group members. CEU eTD Collection Nazlı Altınok i Abstract Human children must acquire culture-specific conventional practices of their social groups to be competent members of their own communities. Given that such conventional knowledge forms are often cognitively opaque to be learned through individual exploration alone, in order to acquire cultural knowledge of their communities, young children must largely rely on the evidence provided by knowledgeable others and be ready to faithfully imitate seemingly inefficient and arbitrary means actions. The present work addresses whether representing social groups facilitates how infants and young children interpret, acquire and maintain sub-efficient means actions. The first study investigated whether 18-month-old infants selectively imitate cognitively opaque actions from models who speak the same language as their own language community in ostensive demonstration contexts. The main finding was that infants showed selective imitation of sub-efficient action demonstrations as a function of the language the demonstrators spoke. The second study explored whether 14- and 18-month old infants expect a particular opaque action form to be shared only among the members of the same social group. Neither 14-month-olds nor 18-month-olds were found to form expectations about how other group-members ought to act on a novel apparatus based on the prior ostensive demonstration of the sub-efficient action manner by a model who belonged to the same linguistic group as the infants and as the other agents in the scene. The third study probed pre-verbal infants’ expectation of shared movement repertoire between animated characters belonging to the same social group and how this shared-movement expectation interacts with their efficiency CEU eTD Collection expectation. The findings showed that expectation of a shared movement repertoire between agents acting in social groups influences 11-month-old infants’ expectations of efficiency of goal directed actions. The final study explored whether preschoolers, in three age groups (4-, 5- and 6-year-olds), can treat sub-efficient action forms and their efficient alternatives in a ii context-sensitive selective manner, depending on the social group membership of the demonstrator. Four-year-olds employed the cue of shared language to optimize acquiring and maintaining culturally shared sub-efficient action routines by selectively updating their action repertoire relying on their language-based evaluation of the demonstrator’s culture-specific competence. In contrast, 5- and 6-year-olds adopted the efficient alternative independently of the demonstrator’s language. The work presented in this thesis has built on different methodologies across different age groups to investigate how sub-efficient action routines are represented, acquired or maintained. Beginning from the age of 11-months infants show sensitivity to the shared- movement repertoires of social groups. Before their second birthday they readily acquire sub- efficient routines from the informants speaking the same language as them. Around the age of 4 years they also rely on the informants’ language as a cue of shared cultural ground and incorporate efficient alternatives into their knowledge repertoire depending on whether the informant speaks the same language as them. Taken together, this work extends previous research on children’s social learning and early action understanding and provides evidence for how we use social categories from an early age on in order to make sense of the behaviors of others. CEU eTD Collection iii To the beloved memory of my father, CEU eTD Collection iv Acknowledgments I would first like to thank to György Gergely for his valuable supervision and his theoretical guidance during this endeavor. Similarly, I would like to thank to Ildikó Király and Mikołaj Hernik for their unwavering support and immensely constructive mentorship through the years. My words fall short for the gratitude I have for you all. Ildikó, without your encouragement this would not have been possible. Thank you. I would also like to thank to all CDC members, and all the amazing research assistants I have been privileged to know: Iulia Savoş, Dóri Mészégető, Zsuzsanna Karap, Szilvia Takács, and Petra Kármán. Thank you to our coordinators Maria Toth and Agi Volein for helping me to maneuver my way around the babies in a language that I am still learning. Köszönöm to Réka Finta, Andrea Schrök, Kati Illés, and Edit Vitrai for their support in the departmental life. I am indebted to Gergő Csibra and Ági Volein, for having an open door for me whenever I needed and for all the support they have kind-heartedly provided. To Ági Kovács, thank you for reading my work, for your insightful comments and for your encouragement. To Malinda Carpenter, thank you for hosting my research visit to the University of St Andrews, and helping me to grow as a person and a researcher. Paula Rubio-Fernández: your support meant a lot to me in every aspect of my academic life, thank you. I would also like to thank to Christophe Heintz, Natalie Sebanz, Olivier Mascaro and Ernő Téglás for their guidance. To all my friends and colleagues in the department, especially Luke, Laura, Mia, Oana, Otavio, Lenka, Denis, Hanna, Helena, Tibor, Eszter S., Ieva, Arianna, Martin S., Martin D., and Çağlan: thank you for your support and encouragement over the years. I am lucky to know each one of you. Thank you to my friends: Ayşegül, Baran, Ceren, Ceylan, Defne, Eymen and Mustafa. Not only for opening your doors to me during my conference trips from Boston to Glasgow but to make the time and effort to me be on my side whenever I needed it, I am grateful for your friendship. I would also like to thank the hundreds of families participating in this research. This work would not be possible without their interest in developmental science. Lastly, I would like to thank my mother, whose resilience and hard work motivates me to better myself every day. You have been my cheerleader through my academic and personal growth. Teşekkürler annem. CEU eTD Collection I dedicate this thesis to the memory of my beloved father, you fought well and taught me a lot about life, death, and everything in between. It pains me not being able to share all this with you, but I know that you would be proud. v Table of contents Chapter I. General Introduction ....................................................................... 1 1.1 How do we interpret actions: the teleological stance .................................................. 6 1.1.1 Interpreting actions beyond physical efficiency: the role of attributed dispositional properties of agents ..................................................................................... 10 1.1.2 Interpreting actions beyond physical efficiency: the role of social factors ........ 15 1.2 What are social groups (and what are they good for)? .............................................. 24 1.2.1 Psychological functions of group cognition ...................................................... 26 1.2.2 Evolutionary perspectives .................................................................................. 29 1.2.2.1 From kin recognition to homophily-based accounts to coalition tracking system .................. 30 1.2.3 The privileged case of linguistic social groups ....................................................... 34 1.2.3.1 Language as a proximal cue for shared cultural knowledge ........................................................ 39 1.3 Overall aim and overview of the empirical studies ................................................... 44 Chapter II. Eighteen-month-olds’ selective imitation of demonstrators who speak the same language as the infant’s social community ........................... 47 2.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................... 47 2.2 Participants ...............................................................................................................

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