Early action-goal understanding in the context of multifunctional tool use

During early childhood, tool-use abilities develop with remarkable speed. This is probably because, in addition to showing profound object exploration skills, infants and toddlers are able to engage in social learning. That is, young children can learn how to use an object as a tool by observing another person’s tool-use actions. Motivated by findings on early multifunctional tool-use learning indicating that the way an object is represented impacts further handling of that object, the first main aim of the present dissertation is to take a closer look at how object representations that are activated when using objects as tools are acquired. In this context, the two abovementioned ways of tool-use learning, namely learning during own exploration and object manipulation on the one hand and social learning on the other hand, are investigated in more detail. A theoretical model on the acquisition of tool-use knowledge through exploratory learning is presented which provides a theoretical basis and framework for interpreting empirical findings on 24-month-olds’ multifunctional tool-use learning in a teaching scenario. Looking into social learning of tool use in more detail, the second aim of this dissertation is to investigate an early ability to use information on others’ desires to interpret this persons’ later tool-use actions. An empirical study is presented, providing first evidence that at 18 months, infants can identify transient action effects, common in tool-use actions, as referent of another person’s emotional expressions. More far-reaching statements about the ability to represent diverse desires for action effects and use that knowledge for action-goal attribution are prevented by toddlers’ pronounced tendency to perform one particular tool movement, regardless of the resulting action effect in a task requiring desire understanding as well as multifunctional tool use. Lastly, prompted by findings indicating that infants and toddlers can activate own action knowledge based on other persons’ goals, this dissertation presents theoretical considerations on how representing others’ goals can facilitate multifunctional tool use, as well as a first attempt to test the derived implications. In sum, the present dissertation highlights the importance of integrating the two ways of learning, i.e., exploratory learning and social learning for successful flexible tool use. Further, it emphasizes the role of the (social) context not only for the acquisition but also for the application of tool-use knowledge.