Collaborative Research: The Children's Research Initiative (CRI): Integrative Approaches: Perception-Action Foundations of Early Tool Use

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AbstractCollaborative Research: Perception-Action Foundations of Early Tool UseDorothy M. FragaszyHow do humans learn to use an object as a tool? According to the theory of action/perception coupling, to use a tool, an individual must detect potential relations between objects that allow actions with one to produce change in another (for example, object A can be used to strike object B), and establish these relations through action. To use one object to change another in a specific way (perhaps to use A to crack B open) requires positioning or aligning the objects appropriately and applying the appropriate force. The number of alignments that must be achieved and how precisely movements must be modulated influence the difficulty of mastering a particular tool. Before they begin to use objects as tools (at about their first birthday), human infants relate objects and surfaces through action, for example, by banging objects together or banging objects on a solid surface. We call these common modes of acting with objects "perception-action routines". Do these routines form the foundation for the appearance over the second year of life of tool use? If so, how are perception-action routines harnessed for this new purpose?A collaborative project will investigate (1) how tool use emerges from infants' perception-action routines (2) how tool use involves detecting and establishing relations between objects and surfaces (3) how skill with a familiar tool is acquired and (4) how the development of skill with hammer tools in young children differs from how capuchin monkeys (that spontaneously use objects as hammers) acquire skill in the same contexts. Taken together, the results of the proposed experiments will help us better understand how tool use develops in children and to what degree tool use represents an ability that is uniquely human.Children between 6 and 24 months of age will be videotaped acting singly with objects and surfaces that vary systematically in properties that affect banging (for example, hardness) and in features of handles. Cross-sectional studies of children's activity with unfamiliar objects, and studies of how children at different ages become skilled with practice at using hammers in varying conditions (for example, when the tool object has a handle vs. when it does not, and when they must be more vs. less accurate in where they strike) will also be conducted. These studies will be replicated with 8 adult capuchin monkeys. Capuchins readily use hammer-tools, but we do not know to what extent they master multiple relations in action as humans do. This work will contribute to knowledge of learning mechanisms that support development of tool-using skills in humans, of age-related changes in learning mechanisms, and of the special qualities of humans in this regard. It contributes to contemporary debates about the continuous or discontinuous origins of tool use in human development and human evolution, and the role of action in learning. Additional broader impacts include involvement of undergraduate and graduate students in research, exposure of the research process to the general public, and the development of a new collaborative relationship between investigators at two institutions and in complementary areas of behavioral study (developmental and comparative psychology).