How prior experience and task presentation modulate innovation in 6-year-old-children

Ebel, Sonja Jördis; Hanuš, Daniel; Call, Josep

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2018.12.004

Cited by 9 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…Despite being an intuitive problem, which does not require a complex and artificial sequence of actions, solving the FPT has proved to be highly difficult for both human and nonhuman primates, as well as other species (e.g., Bird and Emery 2009 ; Ebel et al 2019a ; Hanus et al 2011 ). In fact, the proportion of successful human and nonhuman individuals is typically modest.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Raising the level: orangutans solve the floating peanut task without visual feedback

et al. 2021

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Chimpanzees and orangutans are able to generate innovative behaviors to solve complicated physical problems. For example, when presented with an out-of-reach peanut at the bottom of a vertical tube (floating peanut task—FPT), some of them spontaneously spit water into the tube until the peanut floats to the top. Yet, it is unclear whether this innovative solution results from repeating those actions that bring the peanut incrementally closer to the top or from anticipating the solution before acting. In the current study, we addressed this question by presenting three naïve orangutans with an opaque version of the FPT that prevented them from obtaining visual information about the effect of their actions on the position of the peanut. One of the subjects solved the opaque FPT in the very first trial: he collected water from the faucet and poured it into the opaque tube repeatedly until the hitherto non-visible peanut reached the top. This provides evidence for the first time that orangutans can potentially solve the FPT without relying on sensorimotor learning, but to some extent by mentally representing the problem.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Raising the level: orangutans solve the floating peanut task without visual feedback

et al. 2021

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“…One key element of innovation that we have not considered here is the emergence and process of innovation from a developmental perspective and how user innovation can A u t h o r a c c e p t e d m a n u s c r i p t describe that. Of course, much work has been dedicated to studying how and when children innovate (e.g., Becker 1994;Cutting et al 2014;Carr et al 2015;Ebel et al, 2019)…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

User innovation: a novel framework for studying animal innovation within a comparative context

Hopper

Torrance

2019

Anim Cogn

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Much work has been dedicated to defining and describing animal innovation. Despite this, efforts to compare human and animal innovation have been hindered by perceived fundamental differences between how, and why, humans and animals innovate. Furthermore, these is not a useful framework for comparisons across different taxa. Here, we provide an overview of the current understanding of human 'user' innovation, provide some examples of user innovation, and highlight the parallels between animal innovation and user innovation by humans. User innovation, put simply, is the process by which people invent to satisfy their own needs, not necessarily with the aim of distributing their invention, or marketing it for profit. Thus, it is much more closely aligned to the manner in which nonhuman animals innovate. Our intention is that this discussion will help to re-frame how we consider animal innovation and foster more direct comparisons between human and animal innovation, while propagating new avenues for research, both experimental and observational.

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“…Children’s tool‐innovation struggles go beyond the hook task. In other tasks administered in studies of Western populations, children have needed to form a loop from a piece of wooden wool to pull an out‐of‐reach platform (Tennie et al, 2009), pour water into a tube to bring a toy into reach (Ebel et al, 2019), and unbend pipe cleaners to push a ball from a horizontal tube (Cutting et al, 2011). Results remain consistent: Young children have low success across tasks.…”

Section: What Do We Know About the Development Of Tool Innovation?mentioning

confidence: 99%

After a decade of tool innovation, what comes next?

Rawlings

2022

Child Dev Perspectives

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The study of tool innovation-broadly defined as designing new tools or using old tools in novel ways to solve new problems-has accelerated rapidly over the past decade, almost exclusively in developmental research. Since the seminal findings of Beck and colleagues (Beck et al., 2011) that young working-and middle-class children in the United Kingdom were strikingly unskilled at tool innovation, a wave of research has explored the ontogeny of this skill. Studies reporting that children from geographically diverse cultures find seemingly simple tool-based problem-solving tasks difficult have stimulated evocative questions. Humans are capable of extraordinarily complex technology, including gene mapping, self-driving spacecraft, and augmented reality. How can we achieve so much and be renowned in the animal kingdom for our ability to create and use tools, yet simple tool innovation be such a difficult and late-developing skill? In contrast, how can young children easily master other sophisticated behaviors, such as using smartphones, being multilingual, and understanding complex social norms? After a decade of research, what comes next for the study of children's tool innovation? In this article, I briefly synthesize what we know about the development of tool innovation, then describe five outstanding questions in the field. Combining theory and data, I argue that addressing these questions is crucial to understanding fully the ontogeny of one of humans' most defining skills.

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How prior experience and task presentation modulate innovation in 6-year-old-children

Abstract: How prior experience and task presentation modulate innovation in 6-year-old-children.

Cited by 9 publications

References 49 publications

Raising the level: orangutans solve the floating peanut task without visual feedback

Raising the level: orangutans solve the floating peanut task without visual feedback

User innovation: a novel framework for studying animal innovation within a comparative context

After a decade of tool innovation, what comes next?

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