A cross-cultural investigation of young children’s spontaneous invention of tool use behaviors

Through the mechanisms of observation, imitation and teaching, young children readily pick up the tool using behaviors 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 behaviors observed within the foraging behaviors of wild non-human apes (Reindl, Beck, Apperly, & Tennie, 2016). 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 Australia on the same 12 candidate problem-solving tasks. Children in both cultural communities correctly invented all 12 candidate tool using behaviors, suggesting that these behaviors are wit...幼儿可通过观察、模仿与教学等机制，轻松习得所属文化中的工具使用行为。然而学界对儿童工具使用的基线能力仍知之甚少：即脱离社会提供的信息时，儿童能够独立发明出何种工具使用行为。已有研究表明，儿童可自发发明野生非人灵长类觅食行为中观察到的12项候选工具使用行为中的11项（Reindl、Beck、Apperly & Tennie，2016）。但迄今为止，尚无研究探讨儿童的工具使用发明能力是否会因文化背景不同而产生差异。本研究针对南非桑族布须曼（San Bushmen）社区的2至5岁儿童与澳大利亚儿童，采用相同的12项候选问题解决任务，探究其自发工具使用发明的水平。两个文化群体的儿童均成功发明了全部12项候选工具使用行为，这表明此类行为具备……