The Developmental Origins of Selective Social Learning
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The study of children’s social learning is a topic of central importance to our understanding of human development. Learning from others allows children to acquire information efficiently; however, not all information conveyed by others is accurate or worth learning. A large body of research conducted over the past decade has shown that preschoolers learn selectively from some individuals over others. In the present article, we summarize our work and that of others on the developmental origins of selective social learning during infancy. The results of these studies indicate that infants are sensitive to a number of cues, including competence, age, and confidence, when deciding from whom to learn. We highlight the important implications of this research for our understanding of the cognitive and social skills necessary for selective learning and point out promising avenues for future research.
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Adding random noise to the oracle policy encourages the agent to learn that the behaviour of other agents may be sub-optimal, in which case the agent should engage in selective social learning.
“This encourages the agent to learn that the behaviour of other agents O in the environment may be sub-optimal, in which case agent n should engage in selective social learning [Poulin-Dubois and Brosseau-Liard, 2016].”
From Artificial Generational Intelligence: Cultural Accumulation in Reinforcement Learning (2024) · cites this paper as Poulin-Dubois and Brosseau-Liard, 2016
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Baer, C., Engelmann, J. M., & Kidd, C. (2025) · Developmental Science · doi:10.1111/desc.70027 · Cited by 4 · see citing works
Violations of social expectations enhance infants' learning.
Cao, Q., Smith-Flores, A. S., Zhou, J., Perez, J., & Feigenson, L. (2025) · Cognition · doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106227 · Cited by 5 · see citing works
Infants’ selective imitation of a transitive agent and an intransitive agent
Luo, Y., Pattanakul, D., Weng, Q., & Markson, L. (2022) · Journal of Experimental Child Psychology · doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105517 · Cited by 4 · see citing works
Understanding deceptive intentions behind pointing gestures in 12-15-month-old infants
Varró-Horváth, D., Dorn, K., & Lábadi, B. (2017) · Infant Behavior and Development · doi:10.1016/j.infbeh.2017.03.004 · Cited by 4 · see citing works
Theorien der kognitiven Entwicklung
Siegler, R. S., Saffran, J. R., Gershoff, E. T., & Eisenberg, N. (2021) · Springer eBooks · doi:10.1007/978-3-662-62772-3_4 · Cited by 4 · see citing works
How Children Revise their Beliefs in Light of ReasonsPreprint
Schleihauf, H., Herrmann, E., Fischer, J., & Engelmann, J. M. (2021) · doi:10.31234/osf.io/bhjqz · Cited by 4 · see citing works
Oh, J. H., Ju, N., Graham, S. A., & Choi, Y. (2023) · Social Development · doi:10.1111/sode.12707 · Cited by 3 · see citing works
Examining the Relationship between Children’s Theory of Mind and Social-Emotional Functioning
Haddock, T. (2024) · doi:10.31038/psyj.2024613 · Cited by 3 · see citing works
Insights into Children’s Testimonial Reasoning
Ridge, K. E., Pesch, A., Suárez, S., & Koenig, M. A. (2018) · Springer eBooks · doi:10.1007/978-3-319-77182-3_8 · Cited by 3 · see citing works
A Systematic Review of Psychometric Properties of General Trust Measures Across the Lifespan
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Reassessing the two-stage theory of social learning development: a discussion
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Chai, K.-X., Li, Y., & Zhu, L. (2019) · Advances in Psychological Science · doi:10.3724/sp.j.1042.2019.01427 · Cited by 2 · see citing works
The Evolution of Moral Development
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Who to Observe and Imitate in Humans and Robots: The Importance of Motivational Factors
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Preschoolers, but not yet toddlers, prefer to allocate epistemic trust to leaders than to bullies
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Kappes, C., & Thomsen, T. (2022) · Journal of Experimental Child Psychology · doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105463 · Cited by 2 · see citing works
Young children's source monitoring and selective learning from problematic individuals
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Knowing how you know: Toddlers re-evaluate words learnt from an unreliable speakerPreprint
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The impact of information accuracy on the selective trust of children aged 3–6
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Differences in causal reasoning in preschool-aged children with and without autism
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The ABC of social learning: Affect, Behaviour and CognitionPreprint
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Learning and development in infancy: toward an integrated approach
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Normative Conflict and Normative ChangePreprint
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Artificial Generational Intelligence: Cultural Accumulation in Reinforcement Learning
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“This encourages the agent to learn that the behaviour of other agents O in the environment may be sub-optimal, in which case agent n should engage in selective social learning [Poulin-Dubois and Brosseau-Liard, 2016].”
BackgroundGualtieri, S. (2019) · UWSpace (University of Waterloo)
Speech Disfluencies: Their Role in Comprehension and Word Learning
Morin‐Lessard, E. (2018) · Spectrum Research Repository (Concordia University)
Trust Matters: Measuring Preschoolers' Epistemic and Interpersonal Trust In Teachers
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Ampa, A. T., Hasan, M., Nurjannah, Arisah, N., & Sulolipu, A. A. (2023) · SEMINAR NASIONAL DIES NATALIS 62 · doi:10.59562/semnasdies.v1i1.1188
- Authors
- Poulin-Dubois, D., & Brosseau-Liard, P.
- Affiliations
- Department of Psychology, Concordia University
- University of Ottawa (CA)
- Venue
- Current Directions in Psychological Science
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2016-02
- Volume
- 25
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 60-64
- ISSN
- 0963-7214 (ISSN-L)
- 1467-8721
- PMC
- PMC4840934
- OpenAlex
- W2339621095
- Cited by
- 113
- References
- 41
- Citations by year
- 2026: 10 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 14 · 2022: 13 · 2021: 14 · 2020: 12 · 2019: 11 · 2018: 7 · 2017: 10 · 2016: 6
- FWCI
- 26.54
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Current Directions in Psychological Science (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- uO Research (University of Ottawa) (submittedVersion, public-domain)
- University of Ottawa - Library
- Funders
- Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R01HD068458)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Child and Animal Learning Development
- Social Sciences › Education › Early Childhood Education and Development
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Social Robot Interaction and HRI
- Keywords
- social learning, infant learning, developmental origins, learning from others, social cues, preschool children, social cognition
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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