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Author Reply: Clarifying the Importance of Ostensive Communication in Life-Long, Affective Social Learning

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Daniel Dukes at University of Geneva
Daniel Dukes
Fabrice Clément at University of Neuchâtel
Fabrice Clément
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Abstract

In our attempt to distinguish two types of social appraisal, we (a) clarify the “knower–learner” relationship in affective social learning, (b) underline the important role that affective observation may have in acculturation processes, and (c) highlight some potential consequences for the recent debate on the benefits of child-directed (ostensive) learning.
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Clarifying the importance of ostensive communication
in life-long, affective social learning
Daniel Dukes1, 2 and Fabrice Clément1, 2
1: Cognitive Science Centre, University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland
2: Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
Authors' Note
This work was supported by the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) “Affective
Sciences: Emotion in Individual Behavior and Social Processes”, financed by the Swiss National
Science Foundation (SNSF, 51NF40-104897).
Abstract
In our attempt to distinguish two types of social appraisal, we (1) clarify the 'knower-learner'
relationship in affective social learning, (2) underline the important role that affective observation
may have in acculturation processes, and (3) highlight some potential consequences for the recent
debate on the benefits of child-directed (ostensive) learning.
In our target article (Clément and Dukes, this issue), one of our objectives was to connect
two important concepts used in different research fields in order to highlight social processes by
which individuals use others’ emotional expressions to make sense of their environment
(Holodynski, this issue). We proposed to distinguish social referencing from social appraisal by
showing that the former is a subspecies of the latter category. Furthermore, we aimed to elucidate
this relationship by placing both concepts within a new framework of socio-emotional processes
that we call 'affective social learning'.
We suggested that social referencing necessarily involves intersubjective communicational
exchanges, in the sense that it concerns shared, joint attention on a particular object; both
individuals are attending to the same object and are aware that the other individual is doing
likewise. Social appraisal, as we point out, is not necessarily shared. Walle, Reschke and Knothe
(this issue) held the opposing view, arguing that social referencing and social appraisal are
'coterminous' or, in other words, that they are essentially the same concept.
Each commentary pointed out that both target papers agree that social referencing and social
appraisal are terms that relate to using other people's affective expressions when appraising an
object themselves (Holodynski, this issue; Manstead and Fischer, this issue; Parkinson, this issue).
We were nonetheless encouraged to note that each of the commentaries differentiated between the
two concepts, and that the distinctions were largely made along the lines that we had drawn.
Affective social learning is comprised of dynamic and life-long processes
Our use of the terms 'knower' and 'learner' to describe the dyad involved in the transfer of
affective information needs to be specified for two reasons. Firstly, it may have unintentionally
given the impression that we were talking primarily about the relationship between child and
caregiver (Manstead and Fischer, this issue). While our target article certainly focused on the
ontogenesis of affective social learning (ASL), the inherent processes appear to be influential across
the life-span: all of the ASL processes we highlighted can be employed by infants and adults
(Clément and Dukes, this issue). Thus, ASL should not be reduced to an aspect of child psychology,
but rather, we hope, it should inform research on the role of affect throughout the whole life span.
The second reason is that using 'knower' and 'learner' may lead to ASL being interpreted as
being comprised of processes of social influence between fixed roles. But as Parkinson correctly
points out (this issue), emotion exchanges are not static, as when the social exchange develops, each
participant may be in the role of 'knower' and 'learner' several times. The concept of “relation
alignment” proposed by Parkinson (this issue) makes a better job of capturing various sorts of
emotional influence in daily social interactions than the more limited concept of “learning”.
Nonetheless, it seems important to insist on the specificity of social appraisal processes: by taking
into account the emotional reaction of others, subjects acquire new information about a given
object, event, or person. This information does not have to be very specific. For instance, by simply
observing the interest demonstrated by a third party, one can learn that a certain object is potentially
worthy of attention. It does not yet imply that the observer will find it interesting, but it could be a
first step toward the burgeoning of a new passion, especially when the third party is considered a
role model.
Such observation may also play a major role when individuals are trying to adapt to a novel
social environment. In the case of migrants, for instance, close relatives or caregivers are not always
the most informed about the cultural context where the newcomers will spend the rest of their lives.
In these circumstances, third parties identified as successful members of the new community can
have, thanks to affective observation, even more impact than the individuals’ own parents (Harris,
1998).
The role of ostension in affective social learning
Both the Manstead and Fischer and Holodynski commentaries (this issue) point out that the
main difference we make between social referencing and affective observation is that the 'knower'
may use ostension to intentionally communicate to the 'learner' in social referencing, while the
'knower' may be entirely unaware of being observed in affective observation. While both
commentaries agree that this distinction is an important one to make, Manstead and Fischer argue
that, “it makes little difference whether the learner’s emotional response to a stimulus is shaped by
being actively steered by expressive behavior that is deliberately communicated by a knower, or by
witnessing the knower interacting with the stimulus and apparently enjoying (or disliking) the
experience” (this issue, p. xx).
There is, in fact, some debate in the developmental psychology literature concerning the
impact child-directed teaching has on the learning process (for a critical review, see Schneidman
and Woodward, 2015). Natural pedagogy theory suggests that children have an innate modular
learning system that detects when something is being communicated ostensively and that
subsequently readies them to learn culturally specific knowledge (e.g. Csibra and Gergely, 2011).
Egyed, Kiraly and Gergely (2013) for example, showed that when infants as young as 18 months
old were presented with an experimenter that ostensively communicated her appraisal of an object
to them (interest/like versus dislike/disgust), they were more likely to generalize this appraisal to a
second experimenter than when the appraisal had been made inostensively. In other words, when
the experimenter smiled at the child and called their name before expressing their preference, the
child 'understood' that this was a preference that others would also have. On the other side of the
debate, researchers argue that when being directly taught, learning is improved because the child
and adult share attention and goals, a process which later helps the child recall the content of the
learning (e.g. Moll and Tomasello, 2007; Moore, 2010).
While both sides of the debate argue that there is something special about child-directed
learning, Schneidman and Woodward (2015) argue that the experimental evidence gives reason to
believe that the only benefit that this type of learning has over observational learning is that it helps
children direct and focus their attention. Furthermore, they argue that children that come from
cultures where there is less child-directed learning learn culturally important information from
observation alone (Schneidman and Woodward, 2015) – in other words, the method by which
children learn cultural, generalizable knowledge, could itself be culturally determined.
While the results reported in Egyed et al. (2013) would suggest that there is more than
simply 'added focus' to be gained from learning from ostensive communication (as the child
behaves differently as a function of how the appraisal is communicated), it seems that the debate
about the benefits of child-directed learning over observed learning is destined to continue and the
exact value of the distinction between social referencing and observational learning would appear to
depend somewhat on its outcome. However, whether or not there is a difference in terms of the
lesson that is learned, as Manstead and Fischer (this issue) and Holodynski (this issue) point out,
from the learner's point of view, there is an important difference between whether someone has
taught you something about value intentionally or whether you happened upon the affective 'lesson'
by a chance observation. Perhaps then, the remaining difference between the two concepts would
primarily concern the source and the intentions of the knower: if someone you trust teaches you
something directly about how they feel about an object, it is more likely to make a lasting
impression than if someone is trying to sell the object to you, for instance. This sensitivity to the
intentions of the 'knower' has even been reported in children as young as 12 months old (e.g.
Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005).
Conclusion
While the general premise of an important distinction between social referencing and social
appraisal appears to be condoned by the commentaries here, we hope that the two target articles
promote debate and research more generally in socio-affective processes.
Bibliography
Egyed, K., Király, I., & Gergely, G. (2013). Communicating shared knowledge in infancy.
Psychological science, 24(7), 1348-1353.
Harris, J. (1998). The Nurture Assumption. New York: Free Press.
Moll, H., & Tomasello, M. (2007). How 14-and 18-month-olds know what others have experienced.
Developmental psychology, 43(2), 309.
Moore, C. (2010). Understanding self and others in the second year. Socioemotional development in
the toddler years: Transitions and transformations, 43-65.
Shneidman, L., & Woodward, A. L. (2015). Are child-directed interactions the cradle of social
learning? Psychological Bulletin. Advance online publication.
Tomasello, M., Carpenter, M., Call, J., Behne, T., & Moll, H. (2005). Understanding and sharing
intentions: The origins of cultural cognition. Behavioral and brain sciences, 28(05), 675-691.
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