The current study examined children's spontaneous private speech during the vertical and the horizontal Tube Task to shed light on the cognitive, motivational, and emotional processes underlying tool innovation. Tool innovation is defined as solving a novel problem by using or modifying objects in a new and useful way without prior instructions.…

Spatial play in early childhood is associated with a variety of spatial and cognitive skills. However, these associations are often derived from studies in which different tasks are used across different age ranges, leaving open the question of how children's natural behaviors during spatial play develop from infancy into the early preschool…

In early childhood, young children frequently engage in object-oriented play. According to cultural-historical activity theory, object-oriented play provides children with opportunities to learn about the characteristics and cultural applications of objects and materials. These characteristics are referred to as rules or affordances of objects and…

Various developmental studies have demonstrated that implied object weight is a key variable in children's interpretations of motion, such as predicting the objects' speeds. An additional bias in predictions of object motion is representational momentum (RM), where objects are anticipated to be found in a location farther along in the direction of…

This case study explores how an emergent bilingual preschooler used transmodal practices to engage with objects and compose narratives in sociodramatic play. Video recordings and field notes were collected in a dual language preschool classroom in the United States to examine the actional, verbal, and visual modes used by the focal child during…

This report investigates tool learning and its relations to executive functions (EFs) in toddlers. In Study 1 (N = 93), 18-, 20-, 22-, and 24-month-old children learned equally well to choose a correct tool from observation, whereas performance based on feedback improved with age. Knowledge transfer showed significant progress after 22 months of…

For children with moderate or severe cerebral palsy (CP), a foundational early goal is independent sitting. Sitting offers additional opportunities for object exploration, play and social engagement. The achievement of sitting coincides with important milestones in other developmental areas, such as social engagement with others, understanding of…

When children use objects like adults, are they simply tracking regularities in others' object use, or are they demonstrating a normatively defined awareness that there are right and wrong ways to act? This study provides the first evidence for the latter possibility. Young 2- and 3-year-olds (n = 32) learned functions of 6 artifacts, both…

From the age of 2.5, children use social information to rapidly form enduring function-based artifact categories. The present study asked whether even younger children likewise constrain their use of objects according to teleo-functional beliefs that artifacts are "for" particular purposes, or whether they use objects as means to any desired end.…

To clarify the nature of the social cognitive skills involved in preschoolers' reenactment of actions on objects, we studied 31- and 41-month-old children's reenactment of intended acts (''failed attempts'') in Meltzoff's [Meltzoff, A. N. (1995)]. Understanding the intentions of others: Reenactment of intended acts by 18-month-old children.…