The Preschool Child As Tool Innovator: Perceptual-Motor, Representational, and Socio-Cultural Factors in the Ontogeny of Human Tool Innovation

Innovation is the basis of human material culture; however, its ontogeny is hardly known. Four experiments were conducted using a tool innovation task (Beck et al., 2011) to identify the underlying developmental (Experiment-1), representational (Experiment 1-3-4), perceptual-motor (Experiment 2-3), and socio-cultural (Experiment-4) factors involved in the development of tool-innovation.