This article focuses on how the representational properties of manipulatives affect the strategies children employ in problem solving. Two studies examined the effect of physical materials on 4-7-year-old children's problem solving strategies in a numerical (i.e., additive composition) task. The first study showed how children not only identified…

Five experiments investigated the importance of shape and object manipulation when 12-month-olds were given the task of individuating objects representing exemplars of kinds in an event-mapping design. In Experiments 1 and 2, results of the study from Xu, Carey, and Quint (2004, Experiment 4) were partially replicated, showing that infants were…

Two experiments investigated how 3-year-old children select a tool to perform a manual task, with a focus on their perseverative parameter choices for the various relationships involved in handling a tool: the actor-to-tool relation and the tool-to-target relation (topology). The first study concerned the parameter value for the tool-to-target…