(Re)Inventing the wheel: the development of tool innovation.

Humans use tools in all aspects of our lives. Reading this you are benefitting from a printer or electronic display, perhaps you are using glasses to see, and a mug to hold your coffee. A wealth of research charts the emergence of tools in human evolution, tool use in non-human animals, and human children's readiness to learn from others how to use tools. Most tools that humans use are not found in the environment. They have been made by people. We ask what makes humans such prolific innovators of tools? Tool-innovation has received limited attention in the comparative literature, but ours is the first study of human tool-innovation.

Our goal is to understand the psychological processes involved in tool-innovation. We look at a group whose cognitive processes are still in development and who find it remarkably difficult to innovate tools: human children. In our pioneering work on children's tool-innovation we gave children a simple physical problem: a bucket containing a sticker needed to be retrieved from the bottom of a tall, transparent, vertical tube. Crows have solved variants of this task by bending wire in to a hook to retrieve the bucket. We expected children to easily fashion a hook from a straight pipecleaner to solve the task, given their expertise using pre-made tools in everyday life. To our surprise 3- to 5-year-olds rarely innovated a hook, and it was only at 8 years that the majority of children succeeded. We confirmed the generalisability of our finding and now ask: Why is tool-innovation so difficult for human children?
Two strands of research address this. In one we test if children lack competence in the domain of physical cognition. Perhaps children lack understanding of causation (e.g. how tools interact with the world), materials (that pipecleaners are pliable, although our results are not limited to tasks involving pipecleaners!), or transformation (that actions can reshape objects). In the other strand we consider whether children who possess the requisite causal knowledge are prevented from using it by performance demands, either immature executive function (e.g. they may respond impulsively or be unable to switch strategies once begun) or an adaptation to learn from others.
We will conduct one large individual differences study where we test many participants on a wide range of measures, followed by 9 experimental studies where we manipulate the tasks to understand the cognitive processes more precisely. The former takes fine grained measures of behaviour and looks for relationships with executive function, general intelligence, and language ability. Our experiments explore whether children lack causal information about the solution or the transformation needed (competence) and we manipulate the opportunities for impulsivity and strategy switching, and the social context (performance). While our main focus is development, we also explore adults' innovation and the nature of innovation itself. Adults' innovation is addressed experimentally e.g. do adults prefer to adapt pre-made tools rather than innovate new ones, are they impulsive in their strategy choices? The nature of innovation is the topic of an associated PhD examining the relationship between tool- and other types of innovation.
Our research will have substantial interdisciplinary impact (we have already published in general journals: Cognition, Behavioral & Brain Sciences) as well as in developmental, comparative and cognitive psychology. Furthermore, the research has great potential for bidirectional public engagement - through our partnership with the Birmingham Thinktank museum we will promote our findings to the public and discuss plans with parents and children: we expect to benefit from their suggestions for experimental tasks and everyday evidence of innovation. Furthermore, understanding innovation as a cognitive process should improve the efficiency with which society innovates and how we encourage young people's innovation.

Our research will have impact in two ways:
1) Public engagement - promoting science and gaining input from the public to our studies
2) Capacity building - advanced training of our Research Fellow in scientific and transferable skills, resulting in an independent scientist, research training of our PhD student resulting in a competent and experienced scientist. Both members of our team will be employable in academic, public sector or industrial environments.

Our main partner in developing our impact is the Thinktank science museum in Birmingham (see letter of support). In collaboration with colleagues at Thinktank we will engage in 'meet the scientist' events and produce information and interactive displays. We will work with Thinktank to facilitate public input in to our research: through discussion with visitors and where appropriate more structured events. Thus, our research will have immediate cultural impact contributing to educational opportunities at the Thinktank museum.

We will participate in the University of Birmingham Community Day, where local stakeholders can visit the University and learn about research. Developmental Psychology activities have been well received by adults and children in the past.

We will seek opportunities for all members of the team to engage with the media through the University Press Office and the Ideas Lab.

We will discuss our studies with and feedback results to parents and teachers in nurseries and schools.

Our public engagement activities will contribute to the scientific understanding of the general public. Our research topic is very new and the opportunity to discuss our research and findings with teachers and nursery workers may impact educational environments by highlighting children's physical cognition and observational learning in the classroom.

We elaborate on these plans in the Pathways to Impact document.