Joint and individual tool making in preschoolers: From social to cognitive processes

Abstract

Tool making has been proposed as a key force in driving the complexity of human material culture. The ontogeny of toolrelated behaviors hinges on social, representational, and creative factors. In this study, we test the associations between these factors in development across two different cultures. Results of Study 1 with 5-to-6-year-old Turkish children in dyadic or individual settings show that tool making is facilitated by social interaction, hierarchical representation, and creative abilities. Results of a second explorative study comparing the Turkish sample with a sample of 5to-6-year-old children in New Zealand suggest that tool innovation might be affected by culture, and that the role of cognitive and creative factors diminishes through social interaction in tool making. K E Y W O R D S culture, divergent thinking, dyadic interaction, hierarchical representation, tool innovation, tool making

Hunter-Gatherer Children’s Object Play and Tool Use: An Ethnohistorical Analysis

“…Developmental research has long demonstrated that collaborative learning bolsters children’s ability to solve novel tasks ( Azmitia, 1988 ; Perlmutter et al, 1989 ; Rendell et al, 2011 ) and their logical reasoning skills ( Tomasello et al, 1993 ; Kruger and Tomasello, 1996 ). Such socio-cognitive capabilities may also be central to children’s ability to make and innovate tools ( Gönül et al, 2019 ; Lew-Levy et al, 2021 ). Next, most experimental research on object play focuses on deferred functions related to tool use and tool making skill.…”

Young children spontaneously invent three different types of associative tool use behaviour

“…Thus, it is possible that when administering our tasks with a longer time window, more children will find solutions. To increase the ecological validity of such studies, future projects should provide longer testing times and more possible solutions, and arguably also administer tasks to pairs of participants instead to individuals only (see Gönül, Hohenberger, Corballis, & Henderson, 2019 ; Reindl & Wronski, 2022 ).…”

Where innovations flourish: an ethnographic and archaeological overview of hunter–gatherer learning contexts

“…In psychology, innovation, and specifically, tool innovation, has been defined as the construction of ‘new tools, or using old tools in new ways, to solve new problems’ (Legare & Nielsen, 2015 , p. 689). Although innovative behaviours, including tool use and modification, have been described in other species (see Griffin & Guez, 2014 for review; Lefebvre et al, 2004 ; Overington et al, 2009 ; Reader et al, 2011 ), psychologists are often concerned with understanding the unique cognitive and developmental processes which underpin human innovation, including advanced analogical (Chan et al, 2011 ; Markman et al, 2011 ) or counterfactual reasoning (Tijus et al, 2009 ) to devise solutions, and inhibition (Gönül et al, 2018 ) or cognitive flexibility (Gönül et al, 2019 ; Pope et al, 2020 ) to apply them.…”

“…Although creative problem-solving metrics like divergent thinking (Gönül et al, 2019 ), floating object (Cheke et al, 2012 ; Hanus et al, 2011 ; Nielsen, 2013 ) and functional fixedness (Defeyter & German, 2003 ) tasks have been conducted alongside or as proxies for innovation metrics (Carr et al, 2016 ; but see Beck et al, 2016 ), here we focus on direct measures of tool innovation. For children, the most prevalent tool innovation metric is the hook task, a paradigm originally devised for corvids (Bird & Emery, 2009 ; Weir et al, 2002 ) and later modified for humans (Beck et al, 2011 ; Cutting et al, 2011 ).…”

“…However, applying socially learned information to new settings is probably central to tool innovation in everyday contexts (Muthukrishna & Henrich, 2016 ). For example, after seeing a pre-formed hook, dyads were more successful than individuals at solving the hook task (Gönül et al, 2019 ). In another extractive foraging task, complex tool innovation was observed in groups of 3–4-year-olds, but not individuals (McGuigan et al, 2017 ).…”