In one of the first open diffusion experiments with young children, a tool-use task that afforded multiple methods to extract an enclosed reward and a child model habitually using one of these methods were introduced into different playgroups. Eighty-eight children, ranging in age from 2 years 8 months to 4 years 5 months, participated. Measures…

In the first of two experiments, we demonstrate the spread of a novel form of tool use across 20 "cultural generations" of child-to-child transmission. An experimentally seeded technique spread with 100% fidelity along twice as many "generations" as has been investigated in recent exploratory "diffusion" experiments of this type. This contrasted…

We explored whether a rising trend to blindly "overcopy" a model's causally irrelevant actions between 3 and 5 years of age, found in previous studies, predicts a more circumspect disposition in much younger children. Children between 23 and 30 months of age observed a model use a tool to retrieve a reward from either a transparent or opaque…