The Development of Object Function and Manipulation Knowledge: Evidence from a Semantic Priming Study

How children come to (not) detect and apply multiple functions for objects: Rethinking perseveration and functional fixedness

Although humans acquire sophisticated and flexible tool-use skills rapidly throughout childhood, young children and adults still show difficulties using the same object for different functions, manifesting in, for example, perseveration or functional fixedness. This paper presents a novel model proposing bottom-up processes taking place during the acquisition of tool-use abilities through active interaction with objects, resulting in two kinds of cognitive representations of an object: a lower-level, action-centered representation and a higher-level, purpose-centered one. In situations requiring the use of an object to attain a goal, the purpose-centered representation is activated quickly, allowing for an immediate detection of suitable tools. In contrast, activation of the action-centered representation is slow and effortful, but comes with the advantage of offering wide-ranging information about the object's features and how they can be applied. This differential availability and activation of action-centered versus purpose-centered representations also contributes to a deeper understanding of the cognitive mechanisms underlying perseveration or functional fixedness during multifunctional tool use. When applied to the teaching and acquisition of tool use, the model indicates that the form in which object-related information is provided determines which of the two object representations is fostered, thereby either facilitating or complicating the flexible application of an object as a tool for different functions.

Development of the mirror-image sensitivity for different object categories-Evidence from the mirror costs of object images in children and adults

Object recognition relies on a multitude of factors, including size, orientation, and so on. Mirrored orientation, particularly due to children's mirror confusion in reading, holds special significance among various object orientations. Brain imaging studies suggest that the visual ventral and dorsal streams exhibit distinct orientation sensitivity across diverse object categories. Yet, it remains unclear whether mirror orientation sensitivity also varies among these categories during development at the behavioral level. Here, we explored the mirror sensitivity of children and adults across five distinct categories, which encompass tools that activate both the visual ventral stream for function information and the dorsal stream for manipulation information, and animals and faces that mainly activate the ventral stream. Two types of symbols, letters and Chinese characters, were also included. Mirror sensitivity was assessed through mirror costs-that is, the additional reaction time or error rate in the mirrored versus the same orientation condition when judging the identity of object pairs. The mirror costs in reaction times and error rates consistently revealed that children exhibited null mirror costs for tools, and the mirror costs for tools in adults were minimal, if any, and were smaller than those for letters and characters. The mirror costs reflected in absolute reaction time and error rate were similar across adults and children, but when the overall difference in reaction times was considered, adults showed a larger mirror cost than children. Overall, our investigation unveils categorical distinctions and development in mirror sensitivity of object recognition across the ventral and dorsal streams.

Processing Verb Meanings and the Declarative/Procedural Model: A Developmental Study

According to the Declarative/Procedural Model, the lexicon depends on declarative memory while grammar relies on procedural memory. Furthermore, procedural memory underlies the sequential processing of language. Thus, this system is important for predicting the next item in a sentence. Verb processing represents a good candidate to test this assumption. Semantic representations of verbs include information about the protagonists in the situations they refer to. This semantic knowledge is acquired implicitly and used during verb processing, such that the processing of a verb preactivates its typical patients (e.g., the window for break). Thus, determining how the patient typicality effect appears during children’s cognitive development could provide evidence about the memory system that is dedicated to this effect. Two studies are presented in which French children aged 6–10 and adults made grammaticality judgments on 80 auditorily presented sentences. In Experiment 1, the verb was followed by a typical patient or by a less typical patient. In Experiment 2, grammatical sentences were constructed such that the verb was followed either by a typical patient or by a noun that could not be a patient of that verb. The typicality effect occurs in younger children and is interpreted in terms of developmental invariance. We suggest that this effect may depend on procedural memory, in line with studies that showed that meaning is necessary to allow procedural memory to learn the sequence of words in a sentence.

Tool and object affordances: An ecological eye-tracking study

In the present eye-tracking study, we analysed the visuo-spatial attentional patterns of participants looking at 3D images depicting single tools and object-tool pairs. The object-tool pairs could be thematically consistent, thematically inconsistent or spatially inconsistent. During the first 500 ms of visual exploration, tools were fixated longer on their functional area in all experimental conditions. However, extending the time-window of analysis to 1750 ms, the visual scene was encoded in a faster and more suited-for-action way in the thematically consistent condition (e.g., hammer-nail). Most important, the visual exploration of the thematically consistent pairs focused on the manipulation area of the tool (e.g., the handle of the hammer) more than on its functional area (e.g., the head of the hammer). Finally, when single tools were shown and the entire time-window of analysis was considered (1750 ms), fixation focused on the tool's manipulation area. These results are discussed within the reasoning-based framework of tool use. They highlight the relative role of the visuo-perceptual context in affordance perception and suggest a novel interpretation of the cognitive mechanisms underlying the processing of tools and object-tool pairs in terms of action reappraisal (i.e., a re-functionalization process when the action possibility is mined by the visuo-perceptual context).