Abstract
Recent studies of children's tool innovation have revealed that there is variation in children's success in middle-childhood. In two individual differences studies, we sought to identify personal characteristics that might predict success on an innovation task. In Study 1, we found that although measures of divergent thinking were related to each other they did not predict innovation success. In Study 2, we measured executive functioning including: inhibition, working memory, attentional flexibility and ill-structured problem-solving. None of these measures predicted innovation, but, innovation was predicted by children's performance on a receptive vocabulary scale that may function as a proxy for general intelligence. We did not find evidence that children's innovation was predicted by specific personal characteristics.
Highlights
It seems likely that successful tool innovation in 5- to 8-year-olds may be explained by advances in executive function. We considered another way of thinking about executive function that may be relevant to tool innovation: ill-structured problem-solving
None of the executive function measures made a significant contribution to the regression model and overall the model appeared a poor fit to the data (Cox & Snell R2 1⁄4 0.267)
Neither age nor gender explained this variation in the emergence of tool-making innovation and so we looked to personal characteristics
Summary
To identify personal characteristics that underpin innovation ability in children, we will exploit recent findings that identified children’s surprising difficulty with innovation in physical problem-solving tasks. These studies are based on a task from the non-human literature in which birds made novel hook tools to retrieve an otherwise unreachable item (see [1,18,19]). We attempt to address this and present two individual differences studies in which we compared children’s performance on the hook-making task to other personal characteristics that show variation in young children, in the hope of identifying the characteristics possessed by successful innovators
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
