Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Although children become adept problem-solvers early in life,creating tools to solve novel problems remains challengingthroughout the early school years. To explore this problem,we gave one group of 4-7-year-old children (N = 25) theopportunity to compare multiple materials with matchingfunctional properties across three trials. A second group (N =26) saw the same materials in each trial. We consideredwhether children improved across trials and whether theytransferred any learning to a new exemplar that required adifferent functional technique. Although children learnedequally well across the first three trials regardless ofcondition, children who had the chance to compare materialswere more likely to improve from the initial trial to thetransfer trial. We discuss the implications for identifying theorigins of innovative problem-solving.