Sarah R Beck, Jennifer A D Colbourne, Antonio J Osuna-Mascaró and Alice M I Auerspergg
Affiliation: University of Birmingham, Comparative Cognition Unit, Messerli Institute, University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna
Category: Psychology
Keywords: Cognitive development, Innovation, Problem solving, Comparative psychology
Date: Wednesday 3rd of September
Time: 18:30
Location: Gen. Henryk Dąbrowski Hall (006)
View the full session: Modal Cognition & Problem Solving
Tool-use tasks have revealed important insights into children’s problem solving and innovation. Although children use tools from the second year of life (Brown, 1990), there is a substantial time lag before they create a tool to solve a novel problem. For example in Beck et al.’s (2011) study children needed to bend a pipecleaner into a hook to retrieve a reward in a bucket from a tall transparent tube. Typically, children struggle with this until around 7 or 8 years old, including children from cultures where there is less exposure to pre-made tools (e.g. Nielsen et al., 2014). These studies have focussed on tasks where materials have to be reshaped into a novel tool. Here we report new findings on the development of children’s use of two tools that do not need modifying, but need to be used together to retrieve a reward. In the ‘golf’ study, children had to drop a ball into a large box and use a stick to push the ball over a ledge which released a trap door and reward. 184 human children aged 3 to 8 years attempted the task. Around 50% of 3- to 4-year-olds solved the task and there was a gradual increase in success until 97% at 7 to 8 years old. In the ‘slide’ study, participants had to insert a short stick into a box to push open a gate and then use a long flimsy straw to dislodge a reward. There were two versions of the task: one where the tools could be used sequentially (once pushed the gate remained open) and one where they had to be used concurrently (the gate needed to be held open with the short stick). With 98 children participants aged 4-9 years, we saw developmental change from 16% success on the sequential version by the youngest children to 77% by the oldest children. We also saw a clear difference between the two versions of the task: none of the youngest children solved the concurrent version, rising to 43% in the oldest children. These findings show another type of complex tool use where two tools need to be used together to solve a problem, where success appears in middle childhood, relatively late in the developmental story about children’s tool use. We will reflect on the different cognitive and physical demands in these tasks, making comparisons of other studies where children had to use two tools sequentially (Reindl et al., 2022). We will also explore findings from a parallel stream of research where Goffin’s cockatoos attempted the same tasks. Overall, we will argue that innovation involving complex tool use presents significant difficulties to young children, which is likely to reflect a deprioritising of individual creativity in development by our species, in order to maximise transfer of cumulative culture.
Beck, S. R., Apperly, I. A., Chappell, J., Guthrie, C., & Cutting, N. (2011). Making tools isn’t child’s play. Cognition, 119, 301– 306 Brown, A. L. (1990). Domain-specific principles affecting learning and transfer in children. Cognitive Science, 14, 107–133 Nielsen, Mark, Tomaselli, Keyan, Mushin, Ilana, and Whiten, Andrew (2014). Exploring tool innovation: a comparison of Western and Bushman children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 126 384-394. Reindl, E., Tennie, C., Apperly, I.A., Lugosi, Z., & Beck, S.R. (2022). Young children spontaneously invent three different types of associative tool use behaviour. Evolutionary Human Sciences, 4, e5.