Preschool children's use of perceptual-motor knowledge and hierarchical representational skills for tool making

GÖNÜL G., Takmaz E., Hohenberger A.

ACTA PSYCHOLOGICA, cilt.220, 2021 (SSCI) identifier identifier identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Cilt numarası: 220
  • Basım Tarihi: 2021
  • Doi Numarası: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2021.103415
  • Dergi Adı: ACTA PSYCHOLOGICA
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Scopus, Academic Search Premier, PASCAL, Periodicals Index Online, EMBASE, Linguistic Bibliography, Linguistics & Language Behavior Abstracts, MEDLINE, MLA - Modern Language Association Database, Psycinfo, Directory of Open Access Journals
  • Anahtar Kelimeler: Tool making and innovation, Familiarity, Perceptual-motor knowledge, Social learning, Ideomotor approach, Hierarchical complexity, FUNCTIONAL FIXEDNESS, COGNITIVE ONTOGENY, PRIOR EXPERIENCE, INNOVATION, LANGUAGE, IDEOMOTOR, EMERGENCE, EVOLUTION, CULTURE, FLEXIBILITY
  • Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

Although other animals can make simple tools, the expanded and complex material culture of humans is unprecedented in the animal kingdom. Tool making is a slow and late-developing ability in humans, and preschool children find making tools to solve problems very challenging. This difficulty in tool making might be related to the lack of familiarity with the tools and may be overcome by children's long term perceptual-motor knowledge. Thus, in this study, the effect of tool familiarity on tool making was investigated with a task in which 5-to-6-yearold children (n = 75) were asked to remove a small bucket from a vertical tube. The results show that children are better at tool making if the tool and its relation to the task are familiar to them (e.g., soda straw). Moreover, we also replicated the finding that hierarchical complexity and tool making were significantly related. Results are discussed in light of the ideomotor approach.