Comparative Cognition Unit, Messerli Institute, University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, Veterinärplatz 1, 1210, Vienna, Austria.
School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK.
Sci Rep. 2024 Sep 13;14(1):21374. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-71686-8.
School-aged children have consistently shown a surprising developmental lag when attempting to innovate solutions to tool use tasks, despite being capable of learning to solve these problems from a demonstrator. We suggest that this "innovation gap" arises from tool tasks with more complex spatial relations. Following Fragaszy and Mangalam's new tooling theory, we predicted that innovating a new "sticker slide" task should be more challenging when two tools need to be used at the same time (concurrently) rather than one at a time (sequentially), despite the similarity of the other task elements. In line with previous work, both versions of the task were challenging for all ages of children (4-9 years) that we tested. However, the youngest group showed particularly extreme difficulties, which was marked by not a single child innovating the concurrent version. Although success significantly increased with age, even the oldest group failed to reach 50% success on the concurrent version of the task, whereas the majority of the two older groups could solve the sequential version. Thus, in this first study of concurrent tool use in children, we found support for the prediction that increasing the complexity of spatial relations in tooling exacerbates the innovation gap.
学龄儿童在尝试创新工具使用任务的解决方案时，表现出惊人的发展滞后，尽管他们有能力从示范者那里学习解决这些问题。我们认为，这种“创新差距”源于具有更复杂空间关系的工具任务。根据 Fragaszy 和 Mangalam 的新工具理论，我们预测，当需要同时使用两个工具（同时）而不是一个一个地使用（顺序）时，创新一个新的“贴纸滑道”任务应该更具挑战性，尽管其他任务元素相似。与之前的工作一致，我们测试的所有年龄段的儿童（4-9 岁）都对这两个版本的任务感到具有挑战性。然而，年龄最小的一组表现出特别极端的困难，没有一个孩子创新了同时进行的版本。尽管随着年龄的增长，成功率显著提高，但即使是年龄最大的一组也未能在同时进行的任务版本中达到 50%的成功率，而两个较大年龄组的大多数儿童都能够解决顺序版本的任务。因此，在对儿童同时使用工具的首次研究中，我们发现支持这样一种预测，即增加工具使用中空间关系的复杂性会加剧创新差距。
