Journal
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL CHILD PSYCHOLOGY
Volume 125, Issue -, Pages 110-117Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE INC
DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2013.11.010
Keywords
Tools; Innovation; Problem Solving; Ill-structured problems; Cognitive Development; Social learning
Funding
- ESRC [ES/J023485/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- Economic and Social Research Council [ES/J023485/1] Funding Source: researchfish
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Tool innovation designing and making novel tools to solve tasks is extremely difficult for young children. To discover why this might be, we highlighted different aspects of tool making to children aged 4 to 6 years (N = 110). Older children successfully innovated the means to make a hook after seeing the pre-made target tool only if they had a chance to manipulate the materials during a warm-up. Older children who had not manipulated the materials and all younger children performed at floor. We conclude that children's difficulty is likely to be due to the ill-structured nature of tool innovation problems, in which components of a solution must be retrieved and coordinated. Older children struggled to bring to mind components of the solution but could coordinate them, whereas younger children could not coordinate components even when explicitly provided. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).
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