Abstract
Through the mechanisms of observation, imitation and teaching, young children readily pick up the tool using behaviours of their culture. However, little is known about the baseline abilities of children's tool use: what they might be capable of inventing on their own in the absence of socially provided information. It has been shown that children can spontaneously invent 11 of 12 candidate tool using behaviours observed within the foraging behaviours of wild non-human apes (Reindl et al. 2016 Proc. R. Soc. B 283, 20152402. (doi:10.1098/rspb.2015.2402)). However, no investigations to date have examined how tool use invention in children might vary across cultural contexts. The current study investigated the levels of spontaneous tool use invention in 2- to 5-year-old children from San Bushmen communities in South Africa and children in a large city in Australia on the same 12 candidate problem-solving tasks. Children in both cultural contexts correctly invented all 12 candidate tool using behaviours, suggesting that these behaviours are within the general cognitive and physical capacities of human children and can be produced in the absence of direct social learning mechanisms such as teaching or observation. Children in both cultures were more likely to invent those tool behaviours more frequently observed in great ape populations than those less frequently observed, suggesting there is similarity in the level of difficulty of invention across these behaviours for all great ape species. However, children in the Australian sample invented tool behaviours and succeeded on the tasks more often than did the Bushmen children, highlighting that aspects of a child's social or cultural environment may influence the rates of their tool use invention on such task sets, even when direct social information is absent.
Highlights
Tools exist in every human culture, they vary wildly in form and function
If young children unfamiliar with certain tool-based problems can spontaneously produce established tool use behaviours when provided with the necessary materials, and this occurs in the absence of direct social information and across cultural contexts, this suggests that such behaviours might exist within the ‘zone of latent solutions’ (ZLS), or within the general physical and cognitive abilities of that species [6,7,8]
We investigated whether children’s performance on each of the four dependent variables (DVs; tool pickup, correct tool use, correct success and incorrect success) varied across communities (Australian/ Bushmen9), the age of our participants (2, 3, 4- and 5-year-olds), and frequency status of the tasks, with sex entered as a control variable, as we expected no differences across sex
Summary
Tools exist in every human culture, they vary wildly in form and function. Through the mechanisms of observation, imitation and structured forms of teaching, young children readily pick up how to use the tools of their culture, ensuring that these toolkits are maintained across generations [1,2]. If young children unfamiliar with certain tool-based problems can spontaneously produce established tool use behaviours when provided with the necessary materials, and this occurs in the absence of direct social information (such as demonstrations or teaching) and across cultural contexts, this suggests that such behaviours might exist within the ‘zone of latent solutions’ (ZLS), or within the general physical and cognitive abilities of that species [6,7,8]. Understanding the extent to which young children may invent simple tool behaviours by individual learning, without the need for social direction, can help identify when such behaviours may have emerged within our evolutionary history, and which living relatives we might share these capacities with
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