Franklin & Marshall College

Scale Errors with Tools: The Role of Experience

We are in the midst of a series of projects exploring a phenomenon known as scale errors. Because children have underdeveloped inhibitory control, sometimes they have difficulty integrating what they see and the action they choose to take. In particular, children sometimes fail to use information about object sizes, and they may make serious attempts to use objects in impossible ways (e.g., trying to ride on a miniature toy car or get into a 4-inch doll's bed). We have been exploring why children make these errors and how this impacts their problem solving as they use simple tools to achieve simple goals.

Eligibility:
1- and 2-year-old children

Tool Use and Theory of Mind

This is a brief, one-session project and is one part of a much bigger line of research designed to explore how children learn about, create, and problem-solve with simple tools and objects. In this study, we are especially concerned with the social information involved in learning how to use new objects. By observing both typically developing children and those on the upper end of the autism spectrum, we are obtaining valuable information about (a) the role of intentional reasoning in the development of human tool use, and (b) whether the social deficits often observed in autism predict particular patterns of object learning.

Eligibility:
- Typically developing children ages 3 and 4
- Children diagnosed with higher functioning autism (including those with Asperger's diagnoses) ages 4 through 6.

Functional Fixedness & Fluency

Most people have a "one tool, one function" bias, meaning that people like to use specific tools for specific jobs. To help us better understand how and why this bias develops, we're documenting how children and adults learn about and use tools. In this study, children and adults see a variety of objects and think about creative ways to use them. We're interested in seeing whether people tend to be initially conservative vs. flexible when initially learning about objects and functions. 

Eligibility: 
Typically developing 5-year-olds, 6-year-olds, and adults. 

Mutual Exclusivity for Tools

This series of projects is for children between the ages of 2.5 and 3.5. Previous projects with children this age have demonstrated that preschoolers already have very strong, adultlike notions of how to use human-made objects. They rapidly assign functions to objects on the basis of a single exposure — just like adults! We have been exploring questions including: Is their performance is based on "low-level" pragmatic constraints, such as expectations of what the experimenter wants? Is it based in "higher-level" construals of the tools themselves, such that they believe objects truly have single, privileged functions? What promotes or inhibits children's creativity in solving simple tasks with simple tools? To answer these questions, we teach preschoolers about novel tools that perform fun, novel tasks, such as ringing special bells and crushing crackers. We subsequently ask them to perform the tasks again, several times, and observe the patterns of their tool choices as they achieve the requested goals.

Eligibility:
Enrollment in this study is currently closed.

Normativity

In the normativity project, children interacted with Sam, a friendly puppy puppet who didn't always use objects in conventional ways! With Sam's help, we explored whether young children grasp the normative nature of object functions. Children usually use objects for their proper functions (for instance, using a paint brush to paint, instead of using a toothbrush), and they might do so for one of two reasons. On one hand, children might simply be mimicking actions they've seen others do before, although they don't especially believe that the objects "ought" to be used in that particular way. If this is the case, they should be quite happy with any feasible action they see performed with an item, just as long as it gets the job done. On the other hand, children might have more rigid beliefs about how objects should be used; they might think that there are "right" ways to use tools. Research suggests that by the time we're adults, we certainly tend to think tools have "right" functions (after all, using a fork to comb your hair strikes most of us as just plain wrong, even though the fork works!). The data from this study suggested that children share these adult-like beliefs by the age of 2 years. We found that toddlers don't appear to simply imitate adults' actions with objects, but rather they normatively expect that objects should be used for their specified, conventionally agreed upon functions.

Eligibility:
Enrollment in this study is currently closed.

Adults' Theories of Children's Minds

This preliminary investigation was launched in summer 2007. The guiding goal of the project is to explore how adults — and parents in particular — think about children's minds. How do adults predict and explain children's thoughts and expectations? Do adults understand preschoolers' beliefs and desires? What do parents think about children's tool use? The initial pilot study involved 25 parents and their 3-year-olds. Parents filled out a survey while the child participated in a range of corresponding projects. We will soon be initiating a follow-up project. Stay tuned!

Teleo-Functional Explanations Among Romanian Romani (Gypsy) Adults

"Teleo-functional" explanations account for objects in terms of purpose, helping us understand objects such as pencils (for writing) and body parts such as ears (for hearing). Western-educated adults restrict teleo-functional attributions to artifact, biological, and behavioral phenomena, considering these explanations less appropriate for nonliving natural entities. In contrast, children extend explanations of purpose to the nonliving natural domain, a tendency that has become known as "promiscuous teleology."

In May 2002 and again in March 2006, Dr. Casler traveled to beautiful central Romania to work with a group of Romani (Gypsy) adults. The cross-cultural study she conducted (in collaboration with Dr. Deb Kelemen from Boston University) explores whether eventual restrictions in children's "promiscuous teleology" occur as a function of age and development, generally, or scientific literacy, more specifically.