Children struggle with independently innovating solutions to physical problems until around 8-years-old. This pre-registered study tested whether encouraging 5-7-year-olds (N = 83) to (1) explore task materials or (2) generate explanations would support innovative problem-solving in two tasks that involved accessing an out-of-reach item (the hook task and water-displacement task). Children were assigned to one of three conditions (Explore, Explain, Baseline). In the pre-test phase children were prompted to: (1) explore task materials (the functional and non-functional items presented alongside each task), (2) explain how the materials could be used to problem solve, or (3) complete a filler task, respectively. During the test phase of the Explain condition the experimenter used verbal prompts (e.g., "Why did that happen when you did that?") to elicit explanations from children. These were matched with neutral "report" prompts ("What happened when you did that?") in the Explore and Baseline groups. Overall success rates were 48.2% (hook task) and 59% (water-displacement task), but there were no significant differences between conditions in success, whether children used the functional item first, or time to success. These findings indicate that neither the Explore nor the Explain manipulations used in the current study facilitated children's problem-solving performance. Exploratory analyses suggested that, regardless of condition, object manipulations, independent discoveries, and iterative tool refinement were associated with success on the hook task. Analyses of children's verbal utterances revealed an association between cognitive speech and success on the hook task. Taken together, these findings suggest that self-directed exploration and task engagement, rather than externally prompted efforts, supported problem-solving success.
Neilson et al. (Fri,) studied this question.