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Researchers commonly use puppets in development science. Amongst other things, puppets are employed to reduce social hierarchies between child participants and adult experimenters akin to peer interactions. However, it remains controversial whether children treat puppets like real-world social partners in these settings. This study investigated children's imitation of causally irrelevant actions (i.e., over-imitation) performed by puppet, adult, or child models. Seventy-two German children (Age[subscript Range] = 4.6-6.5 years; 36 girls) from urban, socioeconomically diverse backgrounds observed a model retrieving stickers from reward containers. The model performed causally irrelevant actions either in contact with the reward container or not. Children were more likely to over-imitate adults' and peers' actions as compared to puppets' actions. Across models, they copied contact actions more than no-contact actions. While children imitate causally irrelevant actions from puppet models to some extent, their social learning from puppets does not necessarily match their social learning from real-world social agents, such as children or adults.

Social learning strategies are key for making adaptive decisions, but their ontogeny remains poorly understood. We investigate how social information use depends on its source (adults vs. peer), and how it is shaped by household composition (extended vs. nuclear), a factor known to modulate social development. Using a simple estimation task, we show that social information strongly impacts the behaviour of adolescents aged 11 to 15 years (N = 256), especially when its source is an adult. However, social information use does not depend on household composition: the relative impact of adults and peers was similar in adolescents from both household types. Furthermore, adolescents were found to directly copy others' estimates surprisingly frequently. This study provides novel insights into adolescents' social information use and contributes to understanding the ontogeny of social learning strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creative labour has an effect on children's and adults' ownership decisions in Western cultures. We investigated whether preschoolers and adults from an Eastern culture ( Japan) would show a similar bias. In a first-party task (Experiment 1), in which participants created their own objects, Japanese preschoolers but not adults assigned ownership to creators. When participants watched videos of third-party conflicts between owners of materials and creators (Experiment 2), Japanese adults, but not preschoolers, transferred ownership to creators. In a British comparison group, both preschoolers and adults showed an effect of creative labour in the third-party task. A bias to attribute ownership on the basis of creative labour is thus not specific to Western culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]