Student Winners

EHBEA 2012, Durham U.K.

Best Student Talk & Poster
Well done to all students for the excellent standard of student presentations this year. In particular, we congratulate those who, by delegate vote, won EHBEA 2012’s student competition:

Lara Wood (Durham University) - Best Student Talk
Emily Emmott (University College London) - Best Student Poster

Lara and Emily have won free EHBEA membership and registration at next year’s EHBEA conference in Amsterdam. Rest assured that formulae were in place to ensure that students talking in parallel sessions & those whose posters were not as prominently placed as others were not disadvantaged in the voting process. Please see below for the abstracts of the winning presentations.

Lara A. Wood1, Rachel L. Kendal2 and Emma G. Flynn1

Copy me or Copy You?
[ Department of Psychology, 2 Department of Anthropology, Centre for Coevolution of Biology & Culture, Durham University, Mount Joy, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK. l.a.n.wood@dur.ac.uk

Objectives: Children are prolific social learners whose faithful imitation of a model’s behaviour is unmatched by other species. Although conservatism to originally learned behaviours (whether personally/socially acquired) has been indicated in animals, our study extends previous research with children by investigating behaviour over multiple trials when subsequent social demonstrations either agree or conflict with prior personal information.
Methods: Five-year-old children (N = 167) either had prior personal or social information (including irrelevant actions) regarding extracting a reward from an artificial-fruit task. Following their subsequent interaction with the task, 53 children received a social demonstration of an alternative solution (including irrelevant actions). Control conditions examined the reasons for any change in behaviour following this ‘social-opposing’ demonstration.
Results: The demonstration of an alternative method led to adoption of that method significantly more than chance (χ2 (1, N = 53) = 13.76, p < .001) regardless of prior information source. With continued task interactions, 51% of these children used both methods, which is significantly more than the 3% who used two methods after they received no further demonstration or one matching their original method (χ2 (2, N = 125) = 39.75, p < .001). Prior-personal information guarded children against the copying of causally irrelevant actions (prior-personal versus prior-social; t38= -2.62, p < .05) although children were still prone to incorporating irrelevant actions into subsequent attempts.
Conclusions: Prior-personal information encourages innovation and exploration of novel tasks and thus reduces behavioural canalisation. Unlike other animals, children are motivated to incorporate multiple methods into their repertoire. This behaviour may be an adaptive social learning strategy serving to increase task knowledge, provide generalisable knowledge vital in our tool-abundant culture, and facilitate cultural ‘ratcheting’. Children with prior personal information though capable of parsing out irrelevant actions may be motivated to copy for social or normative reasons.
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Emily Emmott & Ruth Mace

How much do fathers matter? Paternal investment effects on height in a Bristol cohort study.
Department of Anthropology, UCL emily.emmott.10@ucl.ac.uk

Objectives: Some studies have found that children of single mothers do just as well as children from intact families, and that father absence has little effect on child outcomes. For those who find significant father effects, many of them do not control for maternal investment. It is also questionable whether father presence is an accurate reflection of paternal investment.
Looking at direct parental investment effects on height (an indicator of physical development), we examine whether fathers are important for child growth, predicting that maternal investment has greater impact on children than paternal investment.
Methods: We use clinically measured height data from the subsample of children in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, collected between the ages of 4 months and 6 years (final N=910). Paternal and maternal direct investments are measured by frequency of activities with the child. We conduct a multilevel random-effects regression model to explore direct parental investment effects on child height.
Results: Maternal investment has a significant association with children’s height whilst paternal investment does not: High maternal investment is associated with ‘shorter’ children at 4months, but with an increased growth rate. With an interaction with sex, we find that: a) High maternal investment is beneficial for both sexes, for girls more so than boys; b) Low maternal investment is more detrimental to boys than girls; c) High paternal investment is borderline significant only for girls, increasing growth slightly.
Conclusions: While mothers are clearly important and perhaps ‘specially needed’ for physical development, fathers have minimal effect. This may explain why children of single mothers often do as well as children from intact families.