School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2011 Aug;109(4):497-511. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2011.02.012. Epub 2011 Mar 21.
Despite being proficient tool users, young children have surprising difficulty in innovating tools (making novel tools to solve problems). Two experiments found that 4- to 7-year-olds had difficulty on two tool innovation problems and explored reasons for this inflexibility. Experiment 1 (N=51) showed that children's performance was unaffected by the need to switch away from previously correct strategies. Experiment 2 (N=92) suggested that children's difficulty could not easily be explained by task pragmatics or permission issues. Both experiments found evidence that some children perseverated on a single incorrect strategy, but such perseveration was insufficient to explain children's tendency not to innovate tools. We suggest that children's difficulty lies not with switching, task pragmatics, or behavioral perseveration but rather with solving the fundamentally "ill-structured" nature of tool innovation problems.
尽管是熟练的工具使用者，但幼儿在创新工具（制作新颖的工具来解决问题）方面却令人惊讶地困难。两项实验发现，4 至 7 岁的儿童在两个工具创新问题上存在困难，并探讨了这种不灵活性的原因。实验 1（N=51）表明，儿童的表现不受需要从以前的正确策略转变的影响。实验 2（N=92）表明，儿童的困难不能简单地用任务语用学或许可问题来解释。这两个实验都有证据表明，一些孩子会固执地坚持一种错误的策略，但这种固执不足以解释孩子们不愿意创新工具的倾向。我们认为，孩子们的困难不在于转换、任务语用学或行为上的固执，而在于解决工具创新问题本质上的“非结构化”性质。
