The ontogeny of cultural learning
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Updated: Feb 13, 2026

Quantifying Learning in Young Infants: Tracking Leg Actions During a Discovery-learning Task
Published on: June 1, 2015
1Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, D-04105 Leipzig, Germany.
Abstract:
All primates engage in one or another form of social learning. Humans engage in cultural learning. From very early in ontogeny human infants and young children do not just learn useful things from others, they conform to others in order to affiliate with them and to identify with the cultural group. The cultural group normatively expects such conformity, and adults actively instruct children so as to ensure it. Young children learn from this instruction how the world is viewed and how it works in their culture. These special forms of cultural learning enable powerful and species-unique processes of cumulative cultural evolution.
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