Summary: Yoon et al. (2008)

Humans have a remarkable ability to learn socially, and teaching is a specialised form of cooperative information transmission. It is dependent on the presence of benevolent communication and on the readiness of students to learn. Yoon et al. (2008) hypothesized that human infants should be biased to perceive and member referents of communication, if they are sensitive to those signals typically indicating communication. They tested this hypothesis using 9-month-old human infants, asking whether the infants could discriminate between communicative and noncommunicative social contexts and whether they retain qualitatively different information about novel objects in these contexts. Yoon et al.'s (2008) results show that 9-month-old infants remember the identity of novel objects, but not the location, in a communicative context, while they remember the location of novel objects, but not the identity, in a noncommunicative context. Yoon et al. (2008) propose that infants are sensitive to, and interpret social cues that indicate specific intentions and these represent important mechanisms of social learning, by which others can help determine what information observers retain in memory.