Letting Contingency out of the Box: New Perspectives on Mechanisms of Learning from Social Interaction

How do social interactions create learning opportunities? Research on human and animal learning demonstrates that social interactions facilitate many aspects of development and learning. For example, songbirds and non-human primates acquire their species-typical vocalizations more effectively when embedded in contingent interactions with conspecifics than when exposed to non-contingent or isolated input. Similarly, human infants’ engagement in social interaction predicts later language skills, brain development, self-regulatory capacities, social bonding, and perspective-taking. What remains unclear are the mechanisms underlying this facilitative effect in humans and other species. This article introduces a special issue which aims to address this gap. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Mechanisms of learning from social interaction’.