Study finds adults’ chosen task information outperformed random selection

Passing knowledge onward is only half the job. Someone must also decide what is worth carrying.

That distinction matters whenever one person’s discovery becomes another person’s starting point. Transmission determines whether information travels; selection determines which information travels. A new experiment found that adults’ deliberate choices produced more benefit than task information selected at random, according to an early accepted paper in Scientific Reports.

The comparison offers a possible ingredient in cumulative culture: the process by which socially shared knowledge and skills become more useful over repeated rounds. Information does not necessarily accumulate simply because people exchange it. The helpful pieces must persist while less useful pieces fall away.

Two jobs hidden inside “passing it on”

Imagine that a person discovers several things while tackling a problem. Merely transmitting information could mean forwarding any part of that experience. Strategic selection requires another judgment: which part is most likely to help the next learner?

In the study, adults displayed preferences about the information they supplied to potential learners. Across the experiment, those deliberate choices supported the accumulation of useful discoveries better than randomly chosen task information did. The evidence therefore points to an advantage from choosing the message, beyond the fact that a message was sent.

The available abstract does not provide enough detail to explain the task, participant counts, outcome measure, effect size or statistical uncertainty. Those omissions sharply limit what can responsibly be inferred. The result establishes a comparison within this experiment; it does not by itself establish how broadly the pattern applies.

What the children’s result does—and does not—show

The participating children could perform the task, but the experiment did not detect an extra benefit from intentional rather than inadvertent transmission among the younger groups. That additional advantage appeared at ages 9–10.

This is a result from one experimental design, not a universal developmental timetable. It does not establish that a particular birthday unlocks a general ability to identify useful knowledge.

The authors interpret the later appearance of the advantage as consistent with cognitive abilities that may themselves develop through cultural experience. That is an explanation proposed from the pattern, not a mechanism directly demonstrated by the task.

How researchers test accumulating knowledge

Experiments on cumulative culture face a basic difficulty: improvement can come from private trial and error, socially received information or some combination of both.

Researchers have several ways to investigate the problem. As a review of experimental methods explains, some studies arrange chains in which successive learners receive information from their predecessors. Another approach measures how individuals respond to different inputs and uses those input–output patterns to infer what repeated transmission might produce. Chains can be logistically demanding, while individual-based inferences cannot reproduce every feature of an actual sequence of learners. Neither approach makes a null result a general verdict on a population’s abilities.

The new paper’s useful contribution is precise: in its adult experiment, deliberately deciding which information would continue produced a greater benefit than random selection. Knowledge may accumulate not only because discoveries travel, but because some discoveries are chosen for the trip.

An early, peer-reviewed accepted version was published on September 19, 2026. It is citable and will undergo further editing before the final Version of Record.