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Publication

Human infants' learning of social structures: The case of dominance hierarchy

Editors
Title / Series / Name
Psychological Science
Publication Volume
25
Publication Issue
1
Pages
Editors
Keywords
Social dominance
Transitive reasoning
Social relations
Structure learning
Naive sociology
Cognitive development
Social structure
Social cognition
Infant development
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/9719
Abstract
This paper investigates whether human infants go beyond learning about individual social partners and their relations, and form hypotheses about how social groups are organized. We test 15-month-olds’ capacity to represent social dominance hierarchies with more than two agents. Infants find it harder to memorise dominance relations presented in an order that hinders the incremental formation of a single structure (Study 1). Thus, infants attempt to build structures incrementally, relation by relation, thereby simplifying the complex problem of recognizing a social structure. Infants also find circular dominance structures harder to process than linear ones (Study 2). These expectations about the shape of structures may facilitate learning. Our results suggest that infants attempt to represent social structures composed of social relations.
Topic
Publisher
Place of Publication
Type
Journal article
Date
2014
Language
ISBN
Identifiers
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797613500509
Unit