The origins of children's understanding of technologies: A focused rapid review of three approaches

Abstract

How children's understanding of emerging technologies originates is a critical, fundamental, and challenging research question. Placing this question in the history of human evolution and technology development, the present article uses a newly designed literature review method, focused rapid review, to synthesize three fields of research, developmental psychology, behavioral archaeology, and comparative primatology. The six highly cited empirical studies highlighted in the review demonstrate how infants understand simple artifacts, how ancient humans made, used, and understood stone technologies, and how non-human primates make, use, and understand simple tools. The article concludes with a discussion of four implications for examining the origins of children's understanding of emerging technologies in a broader intellectual context.