Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Children find tool innovation difficult until they are around 8-years-old, despite being prolific tool users and imaginative. We drew on Construal Level Theory to test whether a spatial distance prime could improve children’s performance. In three experiments we found evidence that performance did improve when children were primed to think in an abstract way (Experiments 1 and 2). We examined an alternative explanation that the effect arose through positive mood induction, but found no evidence for this (Experiment 3). Overall, our findings inform us about how children’s innovation might be supported, and are one of few findings showing that psychological distance has impact on children’s thinking.