Unconventional tool use in infants: Using a familiar tool in a novel way in the second year of life

Autor: Maninderjit Kaur, Amy Needham, Ashley Detherage
Rok vydání: 2020
Předmět:
Zdroj: Cognitive Development. 54:100881
ISSN: 0885-2014
Popis: The current study explored the unconventional use of a familiar tool (a spoon) in infants during the second year of life. Infants between 14 and 18 months of age were given a task requiring an unconventional grasp of a spoon (at its bowl) and inserting its handle into a box’s hole. Success in this task requires infants to inhibit their conventional action plan (grasping the spoon’s handle) and instead perform the task as demonstrated by the experimenter at the beginning of the trial (grasping the spoon’s bowl). Prior research had revealed that infants in this age range had a low success rate in this task. To investigate the possibility that infants’ difficulty in the task was related to their inability to inhibit the well-practiced conventional grasping behavior (e.g., grasping the spoon’s handle), the tools (the spoon and a novel tool on different trials) were presented in a holder that restricted grasping to the bowl of the tools, and on the table that did not restrict the grasping of the tools. The study measures included overall success, time taken to succeed, as well as the grasping strategies used by infants during the task. Parents responded to questions about their infant’s effortful/inhibitory control and prior experience with spoons; associations between these measures and infants’ performance on the tool task were obtained. Our data revealed that type of tool (spoon or novel tool) and method of presentation (in the holder or on the table) were reliable predictors of infants’ success in the task. In addition, infants who had greater active use of spoons at home, as well as better inhibitory control showed more appropriate grasping of tools and required less time to successfully complete the task.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
Externí odkaz: