Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Psychology
First Advisor
Keil, Frank
Abstract
Cumulative culture has amplified human knowledge far beyond what any individual learner could teach themselves or even be taught in a single lifetime: a doctor can learn to drive a car without having to literally reinvent the wheel. In some cases, complex artifacts can be produced through the accumulation of incremental improvements over time; but frequently, they’re a product of more or less direct collaboration. But collaboration comes with costs of its own. This thesis is about the cognitive capacities individuals need for collaborative learning to be worth the trouble. I first describe a set of interrelated obstacles to the accumulation of technical knowledge by individual learners capable of learning from each other, and outline some of the tradeoffs of relying on collaborative learning to overcome these obstacles. I then compare these tradeoffs with children’s and adults’ preferences for more or less direct forms of collaboration. I then focus on how reasoning about speed-accuracy tradeoffs in collaborative and individual learning might constrain those preferences. Finally, I discuss what these studies could tell us about the development of collaborative learning and our understanding of distributed cognitive systems.
Recommended Citation
Richardson, Emory, "Children's Intuitive Theories of Group Collaboration" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 945.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/945
