Abstract 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’.
Luchkina et al. (Thu,) studied this question.