CONCEPT
Cultural Learning
Learning from and through others in ways that preserve and build upon what previous generations achieved—uniquely human, uniquely powerful, and uniquely dependent on shared intentionality as its cognitive foundation.
Cultural learning, in Tomasello's framework, is the class of learning processes that enable the cultural ratchet. It includes imitative learning (reproducing the method as well as the result), instructed learning (teaching and learning through explicit pedagogy), and collaborative learning (jointly constructing understanding through shared activity). What distinguishes cultural learning from individual learning or simple social learning is that it preserves and transmits the achievements of previous generations with sufficient fidelity that improvements accumulate. A child learning to use a spoon is engaging in cultural learning—inheriting a tool and a technique shaped by thousands of years of refinement. The learning is social (the child learns from caregivers) but also cultural (what the child learns is the accumulated product of the ratchet). The capacity develops early, elaborates continuously, and depends fundamentally on the child's ability to engage in joint attention and infer others' intentions.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The three forms of cultural learning—imitative, instructed, and collaborative—emerge in developmental sequence and represent