Henrike Moll

Lew-Levy and Amir contend that children are cultural producers in their own right, contributing to cumulative culture through peer culture. We argue that children’s pedagogical contributions extend beyond the social world of peers. Children not only transmit child-relevant knowledge from peer to peer, but also actively share, with children and adults alike, knowledge both that ultimately stemmed from cognitively mature agents.

When we think of teaching, our thoughts quickly jump to the occupation of the teacher: we imagine an adult instructor in a classroom passing on knowledge to a group of pupils. With such a narrow view of teaching, it is not apparent why fundamental research in child development should concern itself with the emergence of a pedagogical mindset—after all, only a small minority of children grow up to become professional teachers. To see the merit of studying the development of pedagogy, we need a notion of teaching that covers a much wider terrain and recognizes just how varied human teaching interactions are. In "The Culture of Education", Jerome Bruner (1996, p. xi) reminds us that, "Education does not only occur in classrooms, but around the dinner table when family members try to make joint sense of what happened that day, or when kids try to help each other make sense of the adult world, or when a master and apprentice interact on the job." Teaching, we can say, is a transaction between individuals which aims at increasing the knowledge (practical or theoretical) or understanding of some of its participants. This broader conception helps us to see that teaching, unlike institutionalized schooling, is a human universal, and also that it occurs in varied settings (e.g., playgrounds, grocery stores) and interpersonal constellations. It is this last point that motivates investigations of the kind compiled in this Research Topic. Knowledge does not only flow "top down", from adult to child. It also spreads horizontally between children and even runs "bottom up," from child to adult (Qiu & Moll, 2022). A child of adult immigrants helping their parents to understand the host culture's rituals and customs is as much engaged in teaching as is a mother showing her child how to properly hold and twist a screwdriver. The articles in this collection give clear evidence that children, from a young age, have a remarkable ability to identify good teaching and are themselves skilled at teaching. Karadağ et al. examined selective information-transmission in the understudied age of toddlerhood. Two-year-olds preferred showing a naïve learner object functions they had learned from an adult over ones they had discovered by themselves. A comparison group of 5-year-olds were equally likely to demonstrate taught and discovered information–indicating previously unrecognized ontogenetic changes in children's pedagogical choices. Bass et al. tested 3-to 8-year-olds' reasoning about the quality of teaching, in particular their detection of mechanical or rote teaching. Theory of mind predicted children's ability to identify such teaching in adults, and children who skillfully spotted mindless teachers were more discriminant in following a tutor's deliberate demonstrations but not their accidental behaviors. This study contributes to our understanding of learners' sensitivity to the quality, and in particular the intentionality, of acts of teaching. Ye et al. demonstrated that the development of children's teaching is related to mental state reasoning and reflects culturally bound pedagogical styles. The authors compared the use of verbal, contrastive ("do x, not y") and contingent (addressing a learner's specific mistake) teaching methods by 3-to 7-year-olds from American, Chinese traditional and Westernized preschools. Reflecting the West's learner-centered approach to pedagogy, children from American and Westernized Chinese preschools used more verbal and contingent teaching styles than students from the traditional Chinese school system. Bowman-Smith et al. investigated children's teaching of social robots. Learner mistakes not only elicited more teaching behavior, but children who taught robots that made unexpected or atypical mistakes (errors on previously learned material) benefited more from the teaching episode than those who taught robots that made typical mistakes (errors on novel material) or none at all. This study brings important insights into children's sensitivity to the learner's knowledge state, demonstrates how the "learning-by-teaching" process extends even to nonhuman agents, and is particularly timely given current advancements in artificial intelligence. The findings from these papers provoke a re-evaluation of how we conceive education and cultural evolution. Dominant theories from the learning sciences emphasize how educable and "culture-absorbent" children are, but they typically fail to recognize children's productive, over and above their receptive, contribution to education and cultural evolution (Lew-Levy & Amir, 2025). Children's bilateral involvement with teaching harmonizes with the shared intentionality thesis (Tomasello, 2020). According to this thesis, participation in cooperatively structured activities (give-take, speak-listen, throw-catch, etc.) leads to "perspectival cognitive representations", which represent the transaction not just from one's own role but simultaneously from the complementary role of one's interaction partner. Applied to teaching, children internalize the teacher's stance toward them and understand the exchange from both points of view, that of the learner and the teacher—allowing them to reverse roles and return the favor of teaching. We close by pointing out three promising directions for future research. One concerns the significance of children's knowledge of teaching for their cognitive growth. Do we know that children's insights into pedagogy are not just trivial information but meaningful for their learning? Bowman-Smith et al.'s study and work by Jeong and Frye (2018) with Korean students suggests this is so, but more research is needed to demonstrate whether and how children's understanding of teaching impacts their learning. Second, the study of children as teachers remains incomplete without rigorous longitudinal work documenting developmental change in children's use of strategies, the expansion of their...

Empirical studies on selective teaching and informing indicate that children may vary what they teach depending on whom they are teaching, taking into account how helpful the information is for a given audience. The current meta‐analysis quantifies the effect of selective informing and teaching in 2–7‐year‐olds by examining the relationship between the helpfulness of the information and the frequency of information transmission. Through a systematic search that yielded 1483 results, 28 studies (104 effect sizes, N = 2716) met the inclusion criteria. Using robust variance estimation, we found a medium average effect, Hedges’ g = 0.578, 95% CI (0.331, 0.825), suggesting that children selectively share information based on its perceived helpfulness to the listener. Moderator analyses revealed that age and communicative context were significant factors. Children were more informative in their communication when asked to teach compared to other, nonpedagogical prompts. This finding supports and extends natural pedagogy theory—young children not only interpret pedagogical information differently than information acquired through other means, but they are more selective in their informing when teaching. Additionally, we observed a key developmental progression at age 4. Four‐ to 7‐year‐olds, but not 2–3‐year‐olds, selectively shared information that was most helpful for a given learner. This coincides with the development of false‐belief understanding, which undergoes significant development at around age 4. Taken together, the present synthesis suggests that young children actively engage in selective social learning from both sides, that of beneficiaries and benefactors of valuable information.

We argue that the main difference between humans and other animals lies in humans’ unique form of sociality: their shared intentionality. Instead of conceiving of shared intentionality as a special skill humans have in addition to the skills they share with nonhuman animals (the additive account), we propose to think of shared intentionality as transforming human cognition in its entirety (the transformative account, as in the thesis of Kern and Moll). We discuss the relevance of the evolution of the human face for shared intentionality, and we argue that the development of shared intentionality proceeds in the following three steps: 1) newborns’ tendency to engage in preverbal, face-to-face dialogue, 2) 1-year-olds’ drive to jointly attend to the world with others as plural subjects, and 3) preschoolers’ appreciation of individuals’ different perspectives. The shared intentionality thesis defended here can be viewed as an extension of Lev Vygotsky’s sociocultural account of human development.

The rapid growth of cultural evolutionary science, its expansion into numerous fields, its use of diverse methods, and several conceptual problems have outpaced corollary developments in theory and philosophy of science. This has led to concern, exemplified in results from a recent survey conducted with members of the Cultural Evolution Society, that the field lacks ‘knowledge synthesis’, is poorly supported by ‘theory’, has an ambiguous relation to biological evolution and uses key terms (e.g. ‘culture’, ‘social learning’, ‘cumulative culture’) in ways that hamper operationalization in models, experiments and field studies. Although numerous review papers in the field represent and categorize its empirical findings, the field's theoretical challenges receive less critical attention even though challenges of a theoretical or conceptual nature underlie most of the problems identified by Cultural Evolution Society members. Guided by the heterogeneous ‘grand challenges’ emergent in this survey, this paper restates those challenges and adopts an organizational style requisite to discussion of them. The paper's goal is to contribute to increasing conceptual clarity and theoretical discernment around the most pressing challenges facing the field of cultural evolutionary science. It will be of most interest to cultural evolutionary scientists, theoreticians, philosophers of science and interdisciplinary researchers.

Joint attention is an early-emerging and uniquely human capacity that lies at the foundation of many other capacities of humans, such as language and the understanding of other minds. In this article, I summarize what developmentalists and philosophers have come to find out about joint attention, and I end by stating that two problems or questions of joint attention require additional research: 1) the relation between joint attention and the skills for dyadic sharing or affect exchange in young infants, and 2) the evolution of joint attention.

Young children’s receptiveness to teaching is unquestioned, but their understanding of pedagogy has only begun to be explored. Two experiments (N = 90; 45 female) with 4-year-olds from racially and ethnically diverse backgrounds were conducted to test if they exchange general information and use generic language when teaching. Children in both experiments taught more general than episodic information and used more generic than episodic language when teaching. Experiment 2 showed that children did not prefer to report general information or use generic language in a non-pedagogical context. The findings suggest that by 4 years old, children understand that the goal of teaching is to transmit general knowledge.

In this article, we postulate that belief understanding unfolds in two steps over ontogenetic time. We propose that belief understanding begins in interactive scenarios in which infants and toddlers respond directly and second-personally to the actions of a misinformed agent. This early understanding of beliefs is practical and grounded in the capacity for perspective-taking. Practical belief understanding guarantees effective interaction and communication with others who are acting on false assumptions. In a second step, children, at preschool age, acquire the capacity to reflect on and arrive at third-personal judgments about a misinformed agent’s perspective. This capacity is theoretical and grounded in the ability to “confront” perspectives. It allows children to understand that beliefs can misrepresent the state of the world and to predict what (past, future, or hypothetical) actions follow from these beliefs. We conclude with ideas on how practical perspective-taking develops into theoretical perspective-confronting in early ontogeny.

We contrast two theses that make different assumptions about the developmental onset of human-unique sociality. The primary intersubjectivity thesis (PIT) argues that humans relate to each other in distinct ways from the beginning of life, as is shown by newborns' participation in face-to-face encounters or “primary intersubjectivity.” According to this thesis, humans' innate relational capacity is the seedbed from which all subsequent social-emotional and social-cognitive developments continuously emerge. The shared intentionality thesis (SIT) states that human-unique forms of interaction develop at 9–12 months of age, when infants put their heads together with others in acts of object-focused joint attention and simple collaborative activities. According to this thesis, human-unique cognition emerges rapidly with the advent of mind-reading capacities that evolved specifically for the purpose of coordination. In this paper, we first contrast the two theses and then sketch the outlines of an account that unifies their strengths. This unified account endorses the PIT's recognition of the fundamental importance of primary intersubjectivity. Any act of sharing experiences is founded on the communicative capacity that is already displayed by young infants in primary intersubjectivity. At the same time, we question the PIT's interpretation that dyadic encounters have the triadic structure of joint attention. Lastly, we draw on empirical work on the development of joint attention, imitation, and social referencing that serves as evidence that primary intersubjectivity continuously unfolds into the capacity for triadic joint attention.