If we can teach infants how to react observationally in specific ways relating to efficiency and inefficiency, how come we can’t teach world leaders the same thing? I’m sure you can work it out, you can’t see the big picture with a short-term mindset . . .

Growing old is mandatory, growing up, hmm!

Over the past couple of years, the political norm has been turned on its head in many countries around the world. So, it would seem, the more assertive we, as a global people-force become, the more we can begin to elicit change for our future. So, the question is, can we eventually begin to influence real political change for the betterment of our planet? I hope so! The job of our politicians is to be instrumental in delivering the will of its people, which is ultimately the delivery of their manifesto and thus, we trust them to deliver on their promises. With the massive changes in weather patterns recently and the intransigence of many governments, who, in my opinion, puts the present way too far ahead of the future, there should surely be a concern for those that always seem to suffer the most. However, if scientists are correct, nature will not distinguish poor from rich, educated from uneducated, so common sense dictates it should equally be of concern to us all?.

When it comes to caring for our planet, the difficulty is in getting a general consensus of what sustainable earth would look like! So, we must, at some point, bestow such an accord into the hands of the young people of the world, especially in the old world but also the new world countries and allow the proliferation of that accord to spread thru a new world paradigm of global politics; perhaps a grown-up social media?

It is true that cultural transmission -- the ability to pass knowledge on from one individual to another even across generations -- makes us unique among animals. But we also learn by observing what happens in the world around us, for example, by associating events that frequently occur together (or in a rapid sequence). However, human "communication" may constitute such a powerful instrument that it overrides "statistics," as observed in a study just published in PLOS One and conducted by Hanna Marno, a researcher at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste.

The Research:

"Human beings learn from statistical associations between events and objects. If, for example, one event very frequently follows another, we'll learn to associate the first with the second and to use this association in our daily lives" explains Marno. "However, this is not the only way we learn. For humans, in fact, sharing information by communication is a vitally important factor." This means that whereas normally we will associate an object with action after observing their co-occurrence for a certain number of times when certain communicative "cues" intervene (eye contact or verbal reinforcement from another person), then learning could take place far more rapidly and without any need for repeated observations.

"In our experiments, infants aged about 18 months watched an adult interact with a box that had two buttons and a heart-shaped lamp on it; when either of the two buttons was pressed the heart lit up" explains Marno. In the "baseline" condition only the efficiency of the action varied: in one case, the button on the right would light up the heart-shaped lamp two-thirds of the time (high efficiency) and the one on the left only the remaining one-third (low efficiency), whereas in the other case the situation was reversed. In the experimental condition, a "communication" variable was added: the demonstrators could remain neutral (as at baseline) or interact with the child through non-verbal (eye contact) and verbal cues (in so-called "motherese," the typical way adults talk to young children) to emphasise their action. Then, in a later phase, the children were left alone to interact with the box and the investigators recorded which button they pressed first.

"The results demonstrate that in these experiments the 'communicative' signals are more important than the efficiency of the action" explains Marno. "Compared to children's tendency to choose the more efficient button in the neutral condition, in the experimental situation they tended to prefer the button with low efficiency if this had been highlighted by the adult's communicative signals."

More in detail...

Marno started her studies on the effect of communicative signals by testing adult subjects. In fact, communication seems to play a specific, powerful role for adults as well. "Information about an object may be contingent or general. For example, when learning about an object, we can learn its position, which is most of the cases transitory information related to a specific moment in time, or we can learn more general features like its shape and function, which are not bound to any specific time period."

In her experiments with adults, Marno observed that while mere observation of objects can contribute to the acquisition of contingent and transitory information when communicative signals are also present, there is a bias to acquire some permanent, more general information. "Our studies clearly demonstrate the huge importance of communication in human learning."

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Sissa Medialab. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.