Early plant learning in Fiji

• In Event: 3-073 - Community Effects on Children’s Interests, Behaviors, and Beliefs

Integrative Statement

How do young children acquire key skills to build for future success in their communities? One way learners parse their learning environments is through attention mechanisms. Plants may provide an evolutionarily important learning opportunity that crafted early cognition to pay particular attention to them and avoid touching them as potential hazards. Previous research in Western urban infants (Wertz & Wynn, 2014; Włodarczyk, Elsner, Schmitterer, & Wertz, 2018) suggest young children may use a context-general learning mechanism that produces a reluctance to interact with plants but not other objects. However, if children are living in a community with frequent interaction with plants as tools, food, and general structures of daily life, ability to interact with plants presents a key skill necessary for success in these communities.

We test for the presence of an early-developing plant learning bias in communities of Indigenous iTaukei Fijians, who rely upon plants for daily life. We first map the plant learning landscape that these children navigate in adult interviews to construct cultural models of plants uses in horticulture, medicine (interview 1) and what children should and should not be allowed to do with plants (interview 2). Working from this picture of the plant learning environment, we test whether children between 6 and 48 months old (N=33) show a preference or aversion to interacting with plants using a within-subjects time-to-touch paradigm comparing items that are natural vs. artificial, plant vs. non-plant (see Figure 1).

In this pre-registered study (McNamara & Wertz, 2018), we test three hypotheses that would indicate a bias toward avoiding direct interaction with plants:

Hypothesis 1: children should be slower to touch real plants than other objects (both artificial and natural, plant-like and non-plant-like)
Hypothesis 2: if children refuse to touch items, these refusals should be more common for plants than non-plant items.
Hypothesis 3: children should be more likely to seek social information about interacting with plants than other objects, as observed by higher rates of social referencing.

As shown in Figure 1, we find only limited support for hypothesis 1: children are fastest to interact with highly familiar household items (spoon, pot) and slowest to interact with artificial plants. As Figure 2 shows, this difference is indeed driven by artificial plants. We similarly find minimal support for hypothesis 2, with the same interaction between artificial/ natural and plant/ non-plant emerging as in our tests of hypothesis 1. For hypothesis 3, only 13% of item touch trials showed any social referencing; we do not find any support for differentiation of social referencing by item. Results show greater speed and willingness to interact with familiar household objects; as real plants and other natural objects like shells form a part of the typical environment for these children, they may similarly be a part of the normal learning environment for these children. Results further suggest learning strategies may differ based upon requirements of their environments.
 

Authors

• Rita Anne McNamara, Victoria University of Wellington
  Presenting Author

• Annie Wertz, Max Planck Institute for Human Development
  Non-Presenting Author