Preschool children's use of perceptual-motor knowledge and hierarchical representational skills for tool making

Gönül, Gökhan; Takmaz, Ece; Hohenberger, Annette

doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2021.103415

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 73 publications

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“…In summary, we found that our open-ended task did not improve the task performance of the youngest children. Confirming prior work (Ebel et al, 2019;Gönül et al, 2021;Hanus et al, 2011;Nielsen, 2013;Voigt et al, 2019), we found that older children have more success compared to younger children. By implication, young children's failure in prior tasks is not due to their less open-ended nature.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

“…For example, they do not think to bend a straight pipe cleaner into a hook to grab a reward consistently until they are 7 years old (e.g., Beck et al, 2011). Such failures to innovate on the hook and peanut floating tasks have been replicated by multiple labs (Ebel et al, 2019; Gönül et al, 2021; Hanus et al, 2011; Nielsen, 2013; Voigt et al, 2019). However, one limitation of these tasks is that they require children to solely converge on a single solution and provide children with a limited number of resources.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Tinkering to innovation: How children refine tools over multiple attempts.

Burdett¹,

Ronfard²

2023

Developmental Psychology

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The human capacity for technological innovation and creative problem-solving far surpasses that of any species but develops quite late. Prior work has typically presented children with problems requiring a single solution, a limited number of resources, and a limited amount of time. Such tasks do not allow children to utilize one of their strengths: their ability to engage in broad search and exploration. Thus, we hypothesized that a more open-ended innovation task might allow children to demonstrate greater innovative capacity by allowing them to discover and refine a solution over multiple attempts. Children were recruited from a museum and a children's science event in the United Kingdom. We presented 129 children (66 girls, M = 6.91, SD = 2.18) between 4 and 12 years old with a variety of materials and asked children to use those materials to create tools to remove rewards from a box within 10 min. We coded the variety of tools children created each time they attempted to remove the rewards. By comparing successive attempts, we were able to obtain insights about how children built successful tools. Consistent with prior research, we found that older children were more likely than younger children to create successful tools. However, controlling for age, children who engaged in more tinkering-who retained a greater proportion of objects from their failed tools in subsequent attempts and who added more novel objects to their tools following failure-were more likely to build successful tools than children who did not. Public Significance StatementThis study advances how we understand young children's problem-solving skills and capacity for innovation. Prior work has focused on whether children achieve an innovative solution or not; this study captures children's innovative process. Results demonstrate that children who decided to keep more objects from a prior design and who also added more novel objects to their tools following failure were more likely to build successful tools than children who did not.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tinkering to innovation: How children refine tools over multiple attempts.

Burdett¹,

Ronfard²

2023

Developmental Psychology

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“…Their difficulties are probably due to a lack of fine motor skills and coordination of perceptual feedback (Breyel and Pauen 2023 ). Familiarity with tools also improves the tool making performance of 5 and 6-year-old children (Gönül et al 2021 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hooded crows (Corvus cornix) manufacture objects relative to a mental template

Smirnova,

Bulgakova,

Cheplakova

et al. 2024

Anim Cogn

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It was recently found that not only tool-specialized New Caledonian crows, but also Goffin cockatoos can manufacture physical objects in accordance with a mental template. That is, they can emulate features of existing objects when they manufacture new items. Both species spontaneously ripped pieces of card into large strips if they had previously learned that a large template was rewarded, and small strips when they previously learned that a small template was rewarded. Among New Caledonian crows, this cognitive ability was suggested as a potential mechanism underlying the transmission of natural tool designs. Here, we tested for the same ability in another non-specialised tool user–Hooded crows (Corvus cornix). Crows were exposed to pre-made template objects, varying first in colour and then in size, and were rewarded only if they chose pre-made objects that matched the template. In subsequent tests, birds were given the opportunity to manufacture versions of these objects. All three crows ripped paper pieces from the same colour material as the rewarded template, and, crucially, also manufactured objects that were more similar in size to previously rewarded, than unrewarded, templates, despite the birds being rewarded at random in both tests. Therefore, we found the ability to manufacture physical objects relative to a mental template in yet another bird species not specialized in using or making foraging tools in the wild, but with a high level of brain and cognitive development.

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How prior experience in analogous tasks affects three-year-olds’ tool making

Breyel

Pauen

2023

Cognitive Development

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Preschool children's use of perceptual-motor knowledge and hierarchical representational skills for tool making

Cited by 4 publications

References 73 publications

Tinkering to innovation: How children refine tools over multiple attempts.

Tinkering to innovation: How children refine tools over multiple attempts.

Hooded crows (Corvus cornix) manufacture objects relative to a mental template

How prior experience in analogous tasks affects three-year-olds’ tool making

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