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.

最近对婴儿的研究表明，在整个进化史上，植物觅食塑造了人类思维的设计。德国和美国的婴儿避免接触植物，并在接触成年人之前更多地关注他们。这种行为回避和社交观察策略的结合可以在生命的头两年内安全、快速地社交学习植物特性。在这里，我们探讨了在需要与植物频繁互动的环境中成长如何在斐济农村社区的参与下塑造儿童的反应。我们对成人进行了两次访谈，对儿童进行了一项行为研究。成人访谈描绘了这些社区的植物学习景观，并为儿童研究提供了背景。N = 33) 在参与社区中，表现出与德国和美国婴儿相似或不同的回避行为和社交外观模式。我们的成人访谈结果证实，植物的日常和药用知识在整个社区广为人知，儿童有很多机会非正式地了解植物。儿童行为研究的结果表明，斐济年幼的儿童，如德国和美国的婴儿，不愿意接触新颖的人造植物，并且与熟悉的家居用品和贝壳互动的速度最快。与德国和美国婴儿不同的是，斐济儿童也能很快地接触到熟悉的真实植物，在接触它们之前并没有进行差异化的社会观察。