The results showed that there is no strong evidence that the knowledge about restinga plants varies in relation to the origin of young students and also did not point out differences between the ways of acquiring it. For both groups, native and non-native, the most prominent plants and transmission modes (vertical and oblique one-to-many) were the same. This may mean that the non-native families are already well established in the region and know the plants well, passing this knowledge on to their children. In addition, the prominence of the teacher may indicate that subjects related to restinga are being taught in schools, even though our investigation was limited to students. In this sense, other studies involving other actors, such as teachers, have indicated that the contextualization of formal schooling with local knowledge has strengthened the latter and contributed to its perpetuation [50].
The results revealed that schools and teachers tend to contribute significantly to the process of transmission and the perpetuation of local ecological knowledge, especially in recent urbanized areas such as the one studied. Investigations carried out in rural and indigenous communities have shown that non-contextualized schooling negatively affects traditional knowledge about plants and that curriculum content is not relevant to the daily lives of young people [10, 26,27,28]. Another study [51], carried out in the Brazilian semi-arid region, on students’ knowledge about wild vertebrates pointed out that school was one of the ways of accessing knowledge, however, not the main one. The present study, carried out in urban areas in which traditional communities have been losing space and young people are already inserted in a post-industrial scenario, the professor acted as an important transmitter about local plants, as far as we know, even in the absence of an official program of contextualization. This may be a reflection of punctual actions by some teachers in their contextualize classes. However, it is important to emphasize that the official recommendations of the Ministry of Education of Brazil, recognizing the high Brazilian socio-cultural diversity, propose that students develop the ability to recognize the interactions between different societies and nature [52]. Therefore, the engagement and valorization of traditional ethnobotanical knowledge should be encouraged in local curricula.
The most of the informants know the resources of the surroundings, especially edible and medicinal plants common in the restinga (P. arrabidae, A. arenaria, E. uniflora, C. icaco, S. terebinthifolia, and A. occidentale), corroborating studies in the Cabo Frio region [43] and following the trend found in several studies that the childhood is the most important phase for learning in different social groups [1, 3, 8, 18, 19, 53,54,55,56]. However, almost a third of the interviewees did not know about restinga plants. This may indicate a distancing of young people with natural resources and time spent in nature, reducing connecting with plants, as is observed in areas undergoing urbanization and livelihoods changelings [27, 28, 57, 58], which may be occurring in the Cabo Frio region, recently urbanized. In this sense, the restinga plants are low present in the daily activities of those students. In addition, the study region has been experiencing a great increase in violence and crime. According to official Brazilian statistics [59], Cabo Frio is among the 20 most dangerous cities in the Rio de Janeiro state, with 37% homicides increase in 2020. The insecurity has led to a decrease in visits by local populations to the restinga environment which are isolated places with no policing and dangerous in local perception.
In situations where there is a strong dependence on natural resources, children achieve competence in certain cognitive domains at an early age [1, 7, 9, 10, 53,54,55,56], usually before the age of 12. For example, among the Aka pygmy people, 10-year-old boys are able to collect resources and prepare food, and they possess special skills that will not change as teenagers or adults [1]. However, in the studied reality, it is believed that complete sufficiency is lacking. After all, despite having local knowledge about restinga plants, the students cited only two species on average, which was not representative knowledge in relation to the ethnobotanical studies conducted with adults in the same region by Fonseca-Kruel and Peixoto [43]. These authors carried out an ethnobotanical survey of the restinga species used by traditional fishermen (adults). But in the last five decades the traditional activities have been declining due to new opportunities provided by industrialization. Similar results were found by Ruiz-Mallen et al. [50] with adolescent students in a community undergoing urbanization in México. In this sense, possibly the knowledge and use of wild plants is no longer as present in people’s daily lives as it was in the past, a reflection of local changes in lifestyle and interest, provided by new post-industrial facilities. This could be related to the smaller number of plants known to the younger generation, which are in an urban setting. Also, this result indicates that knowledge about native vegetation is present in a small circle of people and not with general public. However, to clarify this hypothesis, investigations with local specialties and their children are required.
Socioeconomic factors can influence the construction of local knowledge. For example, several studies indicate that urbanization may reduce local knowledge, when compared to rural realities, due to less dependence on the environment and greater access to markets and services [21, 60, 61]. Despite the negative trend between urbanization and level of contact with wild plants, an interesting finding is that the local names provided by the young people were at the species level, despite the low average number of plants listed. This can reinforce the importance of these species in the local knowledge system, especially when analyzing the categories of use. A study by Eyssartier et al. [58] in urban, peri-urban, and rural schools showed that students of the latter had greater knowledge about plants, especially in the edible, medicinal, and ornamental domains, the same domains highlighted in this study. Our data suggest adaptive knowledge, since native plants used for food were the best known, and the medicinal category was the second most important. The human mind tends to favor adaptive information [16, 62], it is to be expected that the information of initial learning would be linked to social memories related to survival [6].
A deeper look at the vertical and oblique one-to-many modes showed in our results, highlighting the role of mothers and/or grandparents as learning models, which is common in South America, where women are often responsible for the education of offspring [18, 19, 27]. In the early stages of life, the vertical path is the most important in the transmission of knowledge (for example, [1, 20, 56, 63,64,65,66]). After all, it is expected that those actors who occupy most of the space and time of childhood, parents, are more important for transmission [65]. In the communities of Cabo Frio region, the women were responsible for family nutritional and healthcare [67], reinforcing their role in sharing knowledge about edible and medicinal plants. Mothers and grandparents, who are often in charge of nutritional and medicinal responsibilities, are usually trusted by children, representing secure sources of information for them as noted in other studies conducted in South America [19, 27, 68,68,70].
Although records indicate that parents are the main role models for infants, the pattern can change with the young. The data from the investigated reality suggest that students are starting a phase in which pathways besides their parents are important to them (oblique one-to-many). A similar reality was recorded by Mathez-Stiefell and Vandebroek [71] that, for two Andean groups, the vertical and horizontal modes were equally important in the perception of the informants. In our case, the new models are represented by teachers, possibly because they are people with high social recognition.
With development, people access new models available for copying information [1, 3, 10, 29, 65], like teachers and formal schooling. Therefore, non-parental models become more important in learning at older ages; in other words, the pattern of transmission may change throughout life [10, 29]. For example, Haselmair et al. [70] and Reyes-García et al. [29] pointed out that when children grow up, they begin interacting with actors outside the family nucleus, which results in non-conservative pathways, such as the horizontal, becoming more important in learning. However, individuals of the same age can only pass on elementary knowledge and skills [29], which may explain the low representativeness of the horizontal mode in studied reality. Therefore, accessing information about restinga plants would require specialists as models, like teachers and experts (oblique one-to-many), which is in agreement with studies that emphasize that prestige is one of the biases that that guides social learning [15, 72].
It is interesting to note that the learning pattern did not vary with the origin of the informant. We hypothesized that non-native youth, as they arrive in a new and unknown environment, would tend to learn from local peers, in the case, the horizontal mode being more prominent from them than the vertical mode. However, this did not happen. Vertical transmission was as important for non-natives as it was for natives, and the same pattern was observed for the oblique one-to-many mode. This results may suggest that the immigrant families are incorporating and sharing some dimensions of local knowledge about restinga plants, as seen in southern Brazil [24] and that regardless the youth origin, prestigious is a strong force in choosing models to learn from [15, 16, 18].
The classic models of transmission [1, 63] state that vertical transmission results in a highly heterogeneous cultural system with very slow evolution, as innovations are restricted to family core. Diffusive pathways, like one-to-many, otherwise contribute to more homogeneous knowledge systems and high improvement rates. In the investigated reality, these two pathways with completely different implications were influential. Therefore, what is the relationship between the social learning structure and the distribution and evolution of local knowledge? The result is a system rich in idiosyncrasies, and therefore quite heterogeneous, as shown by many species being cited by one or two people. Only six species were cited by more than ten informants. Heterogeneity is believed to be the result of parental learning. However, in such a heterogeneous system, what would be the contribution of one-to-many learning events? We see two explanations for this. First, because the recognition of teachers as models to learn about local ecological knowledge may be recent in the lives of informants who, until then, learned from their parents, these new pathways may not have yet resulted in the distribution of information. Second, the presence of teachers as an important mode can be a methodological device, as the results were obtained only in schools, which means the data can be biased.
In the investigated reality, teaching (informal and formal) was the most important process of transmitting knowledge, although there are several other/s, such as observation and imitation (see [73]). From an evolutionary psychology perspective, teaching is a cognitive adaptation exclusive to human beings, which allows the most reliable transmission of very complex or subjective knowledge and skills [74]. In addition, from an adaptive perspective, teaching can be a more efficient cognitive process than observation because it is more flexible; that is, it does not require the realization of a skill or knowledge to be transmitted. For example, Soldati et al. [5], who studied groups of farmers, found that mothers explicitly teach their children about medicinal plants, even without the manifestation of a certain disease.
