Involvement of Technical Reasoning More Than Functional Knowledge in Development of Tool Use in Childhood

Abstract

It is well-known that even toddlers are able to manipulate tools in an appropriate manner according to their physical properties. The ability of children to make novel tools in order to solve problems is, however, surprisingly limited. In adults, mechanical problem solving (MPS) has been proposed to be supported by “technical reasoning skills,” which are thought to be involved in every situation requiring the use of a tool (whether conventional or unusual). The aim of this study was to investigate the typical development of real tool use (RTU) skills and its link with technical reasoning abilities in healthy children. Three experimental tasks were adapted from those used with adults: MPS (three different apparatus), RTU (10 familiar tool-object pairs), and functional knowledge (FK; 10 functional picture matching with familiar tools previously used). The tasks were administered to 85 healthy children divided into six age groups (from 6 to 14 years of age). The results revealed that RTU (p = 0.01) and MPS skills improve with age, even if this improvement differs according to the apparatus for the latter (p < 0.01 for the Hook task and p < 0.05 for the Sloping task). Results also showed that MPS is a better predictor of RTU than FK, with a significant and greater weight (importance weight: 0.65; Estimate ± Standard Error: 0.27 ± 0.08). Ours findings suggest that RTU and technical reasoning develop jointly in children, independently from development of FK. In addition, technical reasoning appears partially operative from the age of six onward, even though the outcome of these skills depends of the context in which they are applied (i.e., the type of apparatus).

Young children’s tool innovation across culture: Affordance visibility matters

“…Instead, it appears that children's success suffered due to a failure to integrate the perceptual feedback of their tool manipulation to the target object (Gardiner et al, 2012;van Leeuwen et al, 1994), or a lack of fine motor skills (Bechtel et al, 2013), rather than due to a limitation of their affordance understanding. This reflects previous research demonstrating that young children are better at selecting or constructing a tool appropriate for a task than they are at successfully using it to achieve a goal (Gardiner et al, 2012;Remigereau et al, 2016). Many children on the current task made an ideal innovation on their pipecleaner, but often this action was not finalized to an adequate degree to make it long enough or straight enough to go cleanly down the tube and reach the bucket.…”

Does Touching Real Objects Affect Learning?

“…This close relationship between sensorimotor and semantic information is particularly evident for the acquisition of knowledge about tools and artifacts. As has been discussed above, during learning, the manipulation knowledge that is acquired by haptics and vision is linked to functional knowledge about the contexts and conditions of using the respective artifact (Remigereau et al 2016). Hence, taken together, the findings indicate that haptic exploration contributes to a rich multimodal representation which may also be linked to abstract concepts, thereby facilitating retention and transfer.…”

“…For example, Gredlein and Bjorklund (2005) found that children who engaged in manual play with a range of objects during free play were more successful in choosing appropriate tools for solving a task in a later situation. Furthermore, manipulation knowledge which is acquired by haptics and vision is linked to functional and mechanical knowledge (Remigereau et al 2016). Whereas functional knowledge concerns information about the context in which a tool can be used together with the objects usually used with that tool, mechanical knowledge addresses the underlying physical and technical principles, allowing one to form a mental simulation of the tool use in action (Osiurak and Badets 2016;Remigereau et al 2016).…”

“…Furthermore, manipulation knowledge which is acquired by haptics and vision is linked to functional and mechanical knowledge (Remigereau et al 2016). Whereas functional knowledge concerns information about the context in which a tool can be used together with the objects usually used with that tool, mechanical knowledge addresses the underlying physical and technical principles, allowing one to form a mental simulation of the tool use in action (Osiurak and Badets 2016;Remigereau et al 2016). Taken together, according to current models of tool use, haptic exploration allows for generating manipulation knowledge, which, in concert with functional and mechanical knowledge, forms an embodied representation of one's knowledge about a given artifact or tool.…”

The elephant in the room: What matters cognitively in cumulative technological culture

“…This aspect has been elegantly demonstrated by Baillargeon and colleagues, who have shown how the principle of support evolves in early childhood (6 months: Infants consider any amount of contact between the object and the support sufficient for the object to be supported; 6-9 months: Infants expect an object to remain stable if a significant portion of its surface is in contact with the support; 9 months: Infants understand that other features such as the mass distribution of an object is critical to determine whether a support is appropriate or not, and so on; Baillargeon & Hanko-Summers 1990;Baillargeon et al 1992;Needham & Baillargeon 1993). These findings indicate that mechanical knowledge can be acquired relatively early in childhood and can continue to grow over time (Remigereau et al 2016), even during adulthood. In this respect, mechanical knowledge is never completely accurate and can be the basis for some "magical" beliefs such as thinking that any amount of contact between an object and a support is sufficient for the object to be supported.…”