Culture's building blocks: investigating cultural evolution in a LEGO construction task

Cultural differences in the neural correlates of social-emotional feelings: an interdisciplinary, developmental perspective

Social neuroscience has documented cultural differences in emotional brain functioning. Most recently, these differences have been extended to include cultural effects on the real-time neural correlates of social-emotional feelings. Here we review these findings and use them to illustrate a biopsychosocial framework for studying acculturated social-affective functioning and development. We argue that understanding cultural differences in emotion neurobiology requires probing their social origins and connection with individuals' subjective, lived experiences. We suggest that an interdisciplinary, developmental perspective would advance scientific understanding by enabling the invention of protocols aligning neurobiological measures with techniques for documenting cultural contexts, social relationships and subjective experiences. Such work would also facilitate insights in applied fields struggling to accommodate cultural variation, such as psychiatry and education.

Young children copy cumulative technological design in the absence of action information

The ratchet effect - the accumulation of beneficial changes in cultural products beyond a level that individuals could reach on their own - is a topic of increasing interest. It is currently debated which social learning mechanisms allow for the generation and transmission of cumulative culture. This study focused on transmission, investigating whether 4- to 6-year-old children were able to copy cumulative technological design and whether they could do so without action information (emulation). We adapted the spaghetti tower task, previously used to test for accumulation of culture in human adults. A baseline condition established that the demonstrated tower design was beyond the innovation skills of individual children this age and so represented a culture-dependent product for them. There were 2 demonstration conditions: a full demonstration (actions plus (end-)results) and an endstate- demonstration (end-results only). Children in both demonstration conditions built taller towers than those in the baseline. Crucially, in both demonstration conditions some children also copied the demonstrated tower. We provide the first evidence that young children learn from, and that some of them even copy, cumulative technological design, and that - in line with some adult studies - action information is not always necessary to transmit culture-dependent traits.

Beyond Synchrony: Joint Action in a Complex Production Task Reveals Beneficial Effects of Decreased Interpersonal Synchrony

A variety of joint action studies show that people tend to fall into synchronous behavior with others participating in the same task, and that such synchronization is beneficial, leading to greater rapport, satisfaction, and performance. It has been noted that many of these task environments require simple interactions that involve little planning of action coordination toward a shared goal. The present study utilized a complex joint construction task in which dyads were instructed to build model cars while their hand movements and heart rates were measured. Participants built these models under varying conditions, delimiting how freely they could divide labor during a build session. While hand movement synchrony was sensitive to the different tasks and outcomes, the heart rate measure did not show any effects of interpersonal synchrony. Results for hand movements show that the more participants were constrained by a particular building strategy, the greater their behavioral synchrony. Within the different conditions, the degree of synchrony was predictive of subjective satisfaction and objective product outcomes. However, in contrast to many previous findings, synchrony was negatively associated with superior products, and, depending on the constraints on the interaction, positively or negatively correlated with higher subjective satisfaction. These results show that the task context critically shapes the role of synchronization during joint action, and that in more complex tasks, not synchronization of behavior, but rather complementary types of behavior may be associated with superior task outcomes.