Everyday interactions support toddlers’ learning of conventional actions on artifacts

This study examined how toddlers learned to perform conventional actions on artifacts. Actions were novel assembly actions performed on toys. 32 22-26-month-olds were taught by a primary caregiver to perform the actions in whatever way felt natural to caregivers. Toddlers were then tested on their action learning by an experimenter blind to the toys children had been taught. Children were also tested on untaught control toys. Videos of sessions show teaching and test for each child. During the teaching phase, caregivers taught one toy from each toy category: Puzzle, Block, and Routine. During the test phase, children were tested on their ability to perform actions they had been taught by caregivers as well as action performance on untaught, control toys. Control toys consisted of matched, untaught Puzzle, Block, and Routine toys. At test, performance on the taught toys reflected learning from caregiver instruction. Performance on control toys reflected children's ability to discover target actions without instruction and their toy construction propensity. The coding manual was used to code teaching and the test. Teaching was coded for caregiver and child contributions to the teaching session that were hypothesized to relate to learning. Test was coded for children's action accuracy in performing the taught actions, and ability to spontaneously perform untaught actions on control toys.