Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Knowing the intended use of an artifact impairs people's ability to think of alternative uses. Here we ask whether children consider not just "what" a tool is used for, but also "who" uses the tool in that way. We focused on gender roles since children are sensitive to these early in development and adapted a classic insight learning task (Defeyter and German 2003). Success on the task requires inserting a stick into a tube to remove a ball. We compared children's (N = 112; 27 children/condition) latency to solve the problem at Baseline and three Demonstration conditions. In all the Demonstration conditions, the long stick was used as a magnet wand to brush away iron filings. In the Researcher Demonstration condition– a direct replication of Defeyter and German 2003– this function was demonstrated by a single individual – the experimenter; in the Same and Different Gender Peer Group conditions, the function was demonstrated by a group of children whose gender matched or differed from the participant's. Both Peer Group Demonstration conditions induced functional fixedness comparable to the Researcher Demonstration, and children were slower to solve the problem in all Demonstration conditions than Baseline. Critically however, children were faster to solve the problem in the Different Gender Peer Group condition than in the Same Gender Peer Group Condition, suggesting that children encode attributes of a function's typical user in their representations of artifacts, and that functional fixedness is affected by children's identification with a social role.