Does Prior Tool-making Experience Improve Three-year-old’s Tool Innovation?

• In Event: Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Topic - Cognitive Processes

Abstract

Previous research suggests that pre-schoolers’ capacity to innovate tools is still limited. In a frequently used paradigm (e.g., Beck et al., 2011), children are asked to get a reward out of a vertical tube. To succeed they need to create a tool with a hook to pull up the reward. A study conducted with N = 89 three- to five-year old children in our own lab has shown that five-year-olds are highly competent tool innovators (success rate: 88.2%). However, only one out of 14 three-year-olds was successful (7.1%).
Here, we present a follow-up study, examining the effect of prior experiences with analogous problems on three-year-old children’s ability to create a functional tool in the Vertical Tube Task. Whalley at el. (2017) showed that four- to five-year-old children were significantly more successful when being allowed to use a pre-made tool before attempting the innovation task (with unmodified material) again. In the present study, children worked on two analogous problem-solving tasks, that each require to bend a wire to form a hook suitable to remove a reward from a transparent container. Following training, children worked on the Vertical Tube Task, getting different options to build a tool (i.e., bend a wire, add two pieces to form a long hook or remove a part from an oversized hook-tool). We expect children in the training group (a) to be more successful, (b) to be faster in finding a solution and (c) to use the solution option of bending the wire more often compared to a group without training.
So far, we have tested N = 17 children in the training group (n = 9 girls, mean age = 41.76 months, SD = 3.27, range 36 – 47) and N = 3 children in the group without training. The final sample size will be N = 24 in each group. Preliminary results suggest that children profit from the training: Nine out of 17 children successfully solved the Vertical Tube Task (52.9%). Analysis based on the full sample will be presented on the poster.
Compared to the success rate of our former study without any training (7.1%), the three-year-old children in the present study seem to apply their former experiences with hook tools and are more successful in creating a functional hook to solve the innovation task. Results will be discussed in the light of children’s ability to transfer tool-making knowledge and to draw analogies.

Authors

• Sabine Breyel, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
  Presenting Author

• Sabina M Pauen, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
  Non-Presenting Author