Functional understanding facilitates learning about tools in human children

Abstract

Human children benefit from a possibly unique set of adaptations facilitating the acquisition of knowledge about material culture. They represent artifacts (human-made objects) as tools with specific functions and seek for functional information about novel objects. Even young infants pay attention to functionally relevant features of objects, and learn tool use and infer tool functions from others' goal-directed actions and demonstrations. Children tend to imitate causally irrelevant elements of tool use demonstrations, which helps them to acquire means actions even before they fully understand their causal role in bringing about the desired goal. Although non-human animals use and make tools, and recognize causally relevant features of objects in a given task, they - unlike human children - do not appear to form enduring functional representations of tools as being for achieving particular goals when they are not in use.