Developmental differences in social learning

Learning from other’s experiences (i.e., social learning) is fundamental for human develop-ment and important for educational practice. In contrast to learning from personal experi-ence (i.e., experience-based learning), social learning has hardly been investigated from a developmental cognitive neuroscience perspective. It is important to utilize this perspective to broaden our knowledge of social learning and to gain a more mechanistic view on fun-damental learning principles across development. For this dissertation project, I designed three age-comparative studies (in 8-10 year old children, 13-15 year old adolescents, and young adults) to investigate developmental differences in experience-based and social learning by employing behavioral, electrophysiological and computational analyses. I ad-dressed the questions how peers and non-peers (i.e., adults) influence learning from other’s actions and outcomes (observational learning) in children and how observational learning and advice taking from peers vary across development. Our findings provide important novel insights into the development of social learning. Overall, social learning was beneficial (in terms of accuracy and higher earnings) compared to trial-and-error type learning (i.e., expe-rience-based learning) across development. Importantly, social and individual information were weighted differently across development. (1) During middle childhood, we found en-hanced event-related potentials (ERPs), as well as, more pronounced imitative choice be-havior when observing peers compared to non-peers (i.e., young adults). (2) Children learned more slowly than adults from peer behavior and showed difficulties to use observed feed-back for learning; as seen by enhanced medial prefrontal ERPs and no learning-related changes in parietal ERPs. (3) We found specific developmental differences in learning from good peer advice for children, adolescents, and adults. Adolescents were initially highly sen-sitive to social information of their peers, but quickly used their own experiences for learn-ing and explored more as compared to adults. Although children show higher exploration similarly to adolescents, they could not benefit from it to the same degree. Whereas ado-lescents (as compared to children and adults) selected choices with higher earning, children showed difficulties using negative feedback for learning. Taken together, adolescents showed benefits and children difficulties combining social and individual information when compared to adults. In terms of educational practice, this highlights that different learning forms might be appropriate for different age groups. Children are highly sensitive to nega-tive experiences and have difficulties learning from them. Moreover, particularly during ado-lescence, own experiences (positive or negative) and the freedom to explore seem to be beneficial for learning.

Author dc:creator

• Rodriguez Buritica, Julia M.

• development
• social reinforcement learning
• learning from experience

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://www.fu-berlin.de/sites/refubium/rechtliches/Nutzungsbedingungen

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier URI

http://dx.doi.org/10.17169/refubium-15155

OAI record oai:identifier

https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/oai/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=dim&identifier=oai%3Arefubium.fu-berlin.de%3Afub188%2F10957