Research

This research area examines whether infants possess behavioral strategies to avoid the type of harm that plants can cause. Plants produce a variety of different defenses to protect themselves from herbivores, including toxic chemical compounds and dangerous physical structures like thorns and stinging hairs. Therefore, the primary dangers plants pose to humans are poisoning and physical injury. However, a dangerous plant can only inflict harm if one approaches it and makes physical contact by, for example, grabbing it or consuming part of it. As a result, a simple behavioral strategy of minimizing physical contact with plants can be an effective way to minimize exposure to plant dangers. Further, because even fatally toxic plants can look delicate and beautiful, the best behavioral avoidance strategy is to minimize contact with any unknown plant, regardless of how it may look, until one has received additional information. Consistent with this proposal, our findings suggest that infants are reluctant to touch plants compared to other types of entities prior to receiving social information from adults.

This research area focuses on how individuals acquire and utilize information about plants over the course of ontogeny. Trial and error learning, in which each individual directly samples different plant species and experiences the consequences, is not an effective way to learn about plants. Given that many plants are poisonous, this strategy could result in frequent illness and perhaps even death. Therefore, we propose that human cognitive architecture contains specialized social learning rules that facilitate the safe acquisition of information about plants from more knowledgeable individuals, and enable that learned information to be used in new circumstances. Our work in this research area investigates how infants use social signals from others to learn about plant properties like edibility and danger, and whether these social signals are used in the same way for plants as other entities. Our findings suggest that infants seek social information when confronted with plants, use social information to selectively learn about plant properties, and generalize learned information about plants in specialized ways. 

In order to explore how the plant-related behavioral avoidance strategies and social learning processes unfold in more naturalistic settings, we take our studies out of the lab and into the garden. One of our projects investigated how toddlers and their parents explore plants together in a garden and found that plant scents play a key role in their interactions. In another project, we partnered with a kindergarten to conduct a three-year longitudinal study examining how children learn about plants and remember that information over time. Each summer, children engaged in a gardening program with members of our research team that focused on different features of plants. We assessed children’s knowledge about the plants each year and recorded their behavior during the gardening sessions. Data coding for this project is ongoing and will give us detailed insight into how children learn from others in more naturalistic contexts. Finally, we have collaborative projects examining how infants and young children growing up in close contact with nature in an Indigenous iTaukei Fijian community and Indigenous Shuar communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon interact with plants. These projects have uncovered intriguing cross-cultural similarities and differences in plant avoidance behaviors.