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Early Plant Learning in Fiji

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Abstract

Recent work with infants suggests that plant foraging throughout evolutionary history has shaped the design of the human mind. Infants in Germany and the US avoid touching plants and engage in more social looking toward adults before touching them. This combination of behavioral avoidance and social looking strategies enables safe and rapid social learning about plant properties within the first two years of life. Here, we explore how growing up in a context that requires frequent interaction with plants shapes children’s responses with the participation of communities in rural Fiji. We conducted two interviews with adults and a behavioral study with children. The adult interviews map the plant learning landscape in these communities and provide context for the child study. The child study used a time-to-touch paradigm to examine whether 6- to 48-month-olds (N = 33) in participating communities exhibit avoidance behaviors and social looking patterns that are similar to, or different from, those of German and American infants. Our adult interview results confirmed that knowledge about daily and medicinal uses of plants is widely known throughout the communities, and children are given many opportunities to informally learn about plants. The results of the child behavioral study suggest that young Fijian children, like German and American infants, are reluctant to reach for novel artificial plants and are fastest to interact with familiar household items and shells. In contrast to German and American infants, Fijian children also quickly reached for familiar real plants and did not engage in differential social looking before touching them. These results suggest that cultural contexts flexibly shape the development of plant-relevant cognitive design.

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Notes

  1. Behavioral avoidance is of course not the only strategy humans possess for mitigating plant dangers. Instead, behavioral avoidance operates alongside a variety of other mechanisms, including enzymatic detoxification pathways, conditioned taste aversions, and food neophobia (see Włodarczyk et al. 2018 for a more detailed discussion).

  2. See OSF pre-registration here: https://osf.io/ydbcj

  3. Adult caregiver interviews also include Likert-scale frequency data on events such as restrictions on access to plants and other objects, frequency of exposure to plants, and frequency of direct instruction about plants and other common objects. This frequency data is analyzed along with the results of the child behavioral study below. The full interview dataset can be found on the project OSF page (https://osf.io/6zsng/?view_only=f7040c52cebb4d279fa6adb3a941b8c6).

  4. See the project OSF page for the full study documentation (https://osf.io/6zsng/?view_only=f7040c52cebb4d279fa6adb3a941b8c6).

  5. Foot touch was added to the site-specific protocol. In rural Fijian households, people go around in bare feet most of the time and spend much of their time sitting and working on the floor, as it is considered rude to sit up on a chair unless one is of chiefly rank. Therefore, exploring their world with the feet and the hands is more typical for Fijian children than may be the case in settings with common use of elevated surfaces such as chairs and tables or with footwear.

  6. The majority of these rough vs. primary research assistant coding disagreements were caused by awkward camera angles (N = 10) or the child touching the pot rather than the plant (N = 16). For the “touches pot” trials, 14 were on artificial plant trials. This may indicate an extra layer of aversion to touching the artificial plants directly.

  7. Other studies using similar data have used log-transformed latency data to deal with nonnormality of residuals. These transforms do not substantially improve nonnormality in our data, so we retain the nontransformed data here.

  8. Touch latency data in this study showed nonnormal residuals. Although this is a less serious problem in hierarchical linear regression than in OLS, comparisons to transformed variables were also conducted. None of the transformed variables completely eliminated nonnormality of the residuals, and all corroborate the overall pattern of findings in the raw metric. For ease of interpretation, we report the raw metric here. See ESM S2 for models comparing the raw milliseconds metric with log-transformed, square-root-transformed, and robust heirarchical linear modelling results.

  9. Time duration data in this study showed nonnormal residuals (see the previous note for implications). See ESM S3.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Elimi Uluikadavu for his tireless work in assisting data collection in this study. We thank J. Enright and the members of the Naturalistic Social Cognition Research Group, especially D. Tatlow-Devally and S. Akkaya-Hielscher, for their help preparing the stimuli and coding the video data. Most importantly, we extend our deepest gratitude to the Uluikadavu family and the village of Nasegai, Kadavu, Fiji, for their kind hospitality and all the participating villages for their enthusiastic participation with our research. Vinaka sera vakalevu.

This research was supported by a Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fast-Start grant to R. A. McNamara and funding from the Max Planck Society to A. E. Wertz.

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  1. School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

    Rita Anne McNamara

  2. Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Max Planck Research Group Naturalistic Social Cognition, Lentzeallee 94, 14195, Berlin, Germany

    Annie E. Wertz

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  1. Rita Anne McNamara
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Correspondence to Rita Anne McNamara.

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McNamara, R.A., Wertz, A.E. Early Plant Learning in Fiji. Hum Nat 32, 115–149 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-021-09389-6

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