(Re)Inventing the wheel: the development of tool innovation.

人类在生活的各个方面都使用工具。读到这篇文章，你会受益于打印机或电子显示器，也许你用眼镜看东西，用马克杯盛咖啡。大量的研究记录了人类进化过程中工具的出现，非人类动物对工具的使用，以及人类儿童愿意向他人学习如何使用工具。人类使用的大多数工具都不是在自然环境中找到的。它们是由人制造的。我们会问，是什么让人类如此多产地创造工具？工具创新在比较文献中受到的关注有限，但我们的研究是对人类工具创新的第一次研究。我们的目标是了解与工具创新有关的心理过程。我们关注的是一个认知过程仍在发展中的群体，他们发现创新工具非常困难：人类儿童。在我们关于儿童工具创新的开创性工作中，我们给了孩子们一个简单的物理问题：一个装有贴纸的桶需要从一个又高又透明的垂直管的底部取出来。乌鸦已经解决了这个任务的变种，它们把铁丝弯曲成钩子来取回水桶。考虑到孩子们在日常生活中使用预制工具的专业知识，我们希望孩子们能够轻松地从直管风琴上制作一个钩子来解决这个任务。令我们惊讶的是，3到5岁的孩子很少创新钩子，只有在8岁的时候，大多数孩子才成功。我们确认了我们的发现的普遍性，现在问：为什么工具创新对人类儿童来说如此困难？有两种研究解决了这个问题。在其中一个实验中，我们测试儿童在身体认知领域是否缺乏能力。也许孩子们缺乏对因果关系（例如工具如何与世界相互作用），材料（尽管我们的结果并不局限于涉及管道工人的任务）或转换（动作可以重塑物体）的理解。在另一方面，我们考虑的是，拥有必要因果知识的儿童是否因为表现要求而无法使用它，或者是不成熟的执行功能（例如，他们可能会冲动地做出反应，或者一旦开始就无法转换策略），或者是适应向他人学习。我们将进行一项大型的个体差异研究，我们将对许多参与者进行广泛的测试，然后进行9项实验研究，我们将对任务进行操作，以更准确地了解认知过程。前者对行为进行细致的测量，并寻找与执行功能、一般智力和语言能力的关系。我们的实验探讨儿童是否缺乏关于解决方案或所需转变（能力）的因果信息，我们操纵冲动和策略转换的机会，以及社会环境（表现）。虽然我们的主要焦点是发展，但我们也探索成人的创新和创新本身的本质。成年人的创新是通过实验来解决的，例如，成年人是否更喜欢适应现成的工具，而不是创新新的工具，他们在战略选择上是否冲动？创新的本质是相关博士研究工具创新和其他类型创新之间关系的主题。我们的研究将具有重大的跨学科影响（我们已经在一般期刊上发表：认知，行为和脑科学）以及发展，比较和认知心理学。此外，这项研究具有双向公众参与的巨大潜力——通过我们与伯明翰智库博物馆的合作，我们将向公众宣传我们的发现，并与家长和孩子讨论计划：我们希望从他们对实验任务和日常创新证据的建议中受益。此外，将创新理解为一种认知过程，可以提高社会创新的效率，以及我们如何鼓励年轻人的创新。

Humans use tools in all aspects of our lives. Reading this you are benefitting from a printer or electronic display, perhaps you are using glasses to see, and a mug to hold your coffee. A wealth of research charts the emergence of tools in human evolution, tool use in non-human animals, and human children's readiness to learn from others how to use tools. Most tools that humans use are not found in the environment. They have been made by people. We ask what makes humans such prolific innovators of tools? Tool-innovation has received limited attention in the comparative literature, but ours is the first study of human tool-innovation.Our goal is to understand the psychological processes involved in tool-innovation. We look at a group whose cognitive processes are still in development and who find it remarkably difficult to innovate tools: human children. In our pioneering work on children's tool-innovation we gave children a simple physical problem: a bucket containing a sticker needed to be retrieved from the bottom of a tall, transparent, vertical tube. Crows have solved variants of this task by bending wire in to a hook to retrieve the bucket. We expected children to easily fashion a hook from a straight pipecleaner to solve the task, given their expertise using pre-made tools in everyday life. To our surprise 3- to 5-year-olds rarely innovated a hook, and it was only at 8 years that the majority of children succeeded. We confirmed the generalisability of our finding and now ask: Why is tool-innovation so difficult for human children?Two strands of research address this. In one we test if children lack competence in the domain of physical cognition. Perhaps children lack understanding of causation (e.g. how tools interact with the world), materials (that pipecleaners are pliable, although our results are not limited to tasks involving pipecleaners!), or transformation (that actions can reshape objects). In the other strand we consider whether children who possess the requisite causal knowledge are prevented from using it by performance demands, either immature executive function (e.g. they may respond impulsively or be unable to switch strategies once begun) or an adaptation to learn from others.We will conduct one large individual differences study where we test many participants on a wide range of measures, followed by 9 experimental studies where we manipulate the tasks to understand the cognitive processes more precisely. The former takes fine grained measures of behaviour and looks for relationships with executive function, general intelligence, and language ability. Our experiments explore whether children lack causal information about the solution or the transformation needed (competence) and we manipulate the opportunities for impulsivity and strategy switching, and the social context (performance). While our main focus is development, we also explore adults' innovation and the nature of innovation itself. Adults' innovation is addressed experimentally e.g. do adults prefer to adapt pre-made tools rather than innovate new ones, are they impulsive in their strategy choices? The nature of innovation is the topic of an associated PhD examining the relationship between tool- and other types of innovation.Our research will have substantial interdisciplinary impact (we have already published in general journals: Cognition, Behavioral & Brain Sciences) as well as in developmental, comparative and cognitive psychology. Furthermore, the research has great potential for bidirectional public engagement - through our partnership with the Birmingham Thinktank museum we will promote our findings to the public and discuss plans with parents and children: we expect to benefit from their suggestions for experimental tasks and everyday evidence of innovation. Furthermore, understanding innovation as a cognitive process should improve the efficiency with which society innovates and how we encourage young people's innovation.