Children exhibit a developmental trajectory in their gestures about tools, first producing gestures mapping a body part to an object (extending a finger across the mouth for brushing teeth) and then showing how to hold the tool (gripping an imagined toothbrush). This shift is argued to arise from children’s growing symbolic reasoning ability. However, embodied cognition suggests that first-hand, active experience may drive this developmental change. We hypothesized that age and direct experience would predict imagined-object gestures. In Study 1, we experimentally manipulated 75 US preschool children’s experience (M = 4.4y; 40 females) with the function of novel objects – none, observation only, or observation and direct experience – and in Study 2, we correlated 91 children’s (M = 4.57y; 47 females) production of imagined-object gestures for familiar objects with parental reports of children’s direct and observed experience. Across both studies, we replicated the age-related increase in imagined-object gestures. In Study 1, all children produced more imagined-object and body-part-as-object gestures when they had experience with a novel object. In Study 2, age interacted with first-hand experience in predicting the use of imagined-object gestures, with the role of first-hand experience greater for younger than older children. The results challenge the idea that the shift from body part to imagined-object gestures arises solely as a function of children’s gradual understanding of the dual nature of symbols. They suggest that object representations are initially grounded in action and that children’s embodied experiences in their worlds delineate how experience shapes representational development.
Pyers et al. (Sun,) studied this question.