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Adaptive Content Biases in Learning about Animals across the Life Course

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Abstract

Prior work has demonstrated that young children in the US and the Ecuadorian Amazon preferentially remember information about the dangerousness of an animal over both its name and its diet. Here we explore if this bias is present among older children and adults in Fiji through the use of an experimental learning task. We find that a content bias favoring the preferential retention of danger and toxicity information continues to operate in older children, but that the magnitude of the bias diminishes with age and is absent in adults. We also find evidence that fitness costs likely impact the types of mistakes that participants make in their attributions of dangerousness and poisonousness. These results suggest that natural selection has shaped the way in which we learn and make inferences about unfamiliar animal species over ontogeny, and that future research is needed on how content biases may vary across the life course.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the people of Yasawa and Totoya who participated in this study. The authors also wish to thank the Department of Anthropology at Emory University, the National Science Foundation (PECASE Award Number: 0239683), and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars program for their financial support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Population Health Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 707 WARF Building, 610 North Walnut Street, Madison, WI, 53726, USA

    James Broesch

  2. Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture and FPR-UCLA Center for Culture, Brain, and Development, Department of Anthropology, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    H. Clark Barrett

  3. Departments of Psychology and Economics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Joseph Henrich

Authors
  1. James Broesch
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  2. H. Clark Barrett
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  3. Joseph Henrich
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Correspondence to James Broesch.

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Broesch, J., Barrett, H.C. & Henrich, J. Adaptive Content Biases in Learning about Animals across the Life Course. Hum Nat 25, 181–199 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-014-9196-1

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