Toddlers, Tools, and Tech: The Cognitive Ontogenesis of Innovation

Human culture is unparalleled in technological complexity, yet most children fail simple tool innovation challenges. We explain how multiple cognitive mechanisms, including causal reasoning, problem solving, creativity, executive functions, and social learning work in concert to scaffold the development of tool innovation over childhood. We describe the role these mechanisms play in three core steps of tool innovation; recognizing the problem, generating solutions, and the social transmission of innovations. Using commonly used measures of children’s tool innovation as examples, we detail the role each of these mechanisms plays in the development of tool innovation. We show how understanding the cognitive ontogeny of innovation will help us understand cognitive and cultural evolution. The development of tool innovation presents a paradox. How do humans have such diverse and complex technology, ranging from smartphones to aircraft, and yet young children find even simple tool innovation challenges, such as fashioning a hook to retrieve a basket from a tube, remarkably difficult? We propose that the solution to this paradox is the cognitive ontogenesis of tool innovation. Using a common measure of children’s tool innovation, we describe how multiple cognitive mechanisms work in concert at each step of its process: recognizing the problem, generating appropriate solutions, and the social transmission of innovations. We discuss what the ontogeny of this skill tells us about cognitive and cultural evolution and provide recommendations for future research. The development of tool innovation presents a paradox. How do humans have such diverse and complex technology, ranging from smartphones to aircraft, and yet young children find even simple tool innovation challenges, such as fashioning a hook to retrieve a basket from a tube, remarkably difficult? We propose that the solution to this paradox is the cognitive ontogenesis of tool innovation. Using a common measure of children’s tool innovation, we describe how multiple cognitive mechanisms work in concert at each step of its process: recognizing the problem, generating appropriate solutions, and the social transmission of innovations. We discuss what the ontogeny of this skill tells us about cognitive and cultural evolution and provide recommendations for future research. the capacity to control and sustain attention to goal-relevant stimuli and to ignore goal-irrelevant stimuli. Attentional control allows individuals to focus attention appropriately. the capacity to logically infer cause and effect relationships. In the physical domain, causal reasoning allows children to understand spatial, temporal, and physical relationships between objects, including tools. the capacity to flexibly adjust behavior in the face of environmental changes, by allowing individuals to switch between responses and strategies by disengaging from previously relevant information to attend to newly relevant information. the generation, but not implementation, of new ideas. the accumulation of knowledge and skills in a way that increases the complexity, efficiency, and diversity of technology over time. executive functions comprise attentional control, cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control, and working memory and allow us to achieve our goals by focusing attention, holding task aims in mind, switching between tasks, suppressing inappropriate behaviors, and planning. the capacity to suppress a dominant or natural response or impulse to produce a more appropriate behavior. a process that results in new or modified learned behavior and that introduces novel behavioral variants into a population's repertoire. the process of organizing a sequence of behaviors in a goal-directed manner and results from the coordination of executive functions. Planning involves sequencing future events and developing and carrying out plans. generating solutions to problems in a goal-directed manner. learning resulting from the observation of, or interaction with, another individual or its products. the transfer of behaviors or information between individuals. designing new tools, or using old tools in novel ways, to solve new problems. a flexible memory system responsible for storing, organizing, and manipulating incoming information to facilitate goal-directed behaviors.