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After a decade of tool innovation, what comes next?

Rawlings, Bruce S.

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Abstract

A decade ago, now-seminal work showed that children are strikingly unskilled at simple tool innovation. Since then, a surge of research has replicated these findings across diverse cultures, which has stimulated evocative yet unanswered questions. Humans are celebrated among the animal kingdom for our proclivity to create and use tools and have the most complex and diverse technology on earth. Our capacity for tool use has altered our ecological environments irrevocably. How can we achieve so much, yet tool innovation be such a difficult and late-developing skill for children? In this article, I briefly summarize what we know about the development of tool innovation, then discuss five outstanding questions in the field. With a focus on different empirical and theoretical perspectives, I argue that addressing these questions is crucial for understanding fully the ontogeny of one of humans’ most notable skills.

Citation

Rawlings, B. S. (2022). After a decade of tool innovation, what comes next?. Child Development Perspectives, 16(2), 118-124. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12451

Journal Article Type Article
Online Publication Date Mar 24, 2022
Publication Date 2022-06
Deposit Date Apr 5, 2022
Publicly Available Date Apr 6, 2022
Journal Child Development Perspectives
Print ISSN 1750-8592
Electronic ISSN 1750-8606
Publisher Wiley
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 16
Issue 2
Pages 118-124
DOI https://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12451

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Copyright Statement
© 2022 The Authors. Child Development Perspectives published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society for Research in Child Development.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.





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