ABSTRACT
Tool use offers a privileged situation for an analysis of how children enact the perception of affordances of objects as tools. This chapter analyzes the development of tool selection when children aged 3 to 12 years are given the task of cracking nuts. Nut-cracking is defined as a task which consists of producing the right amount of kinetic energy and transferring it to the nut in order to produce an adequate deformation of the shell so that it breaks. The exploratory behavior of the children changed a great deal with age. Here again the youngest group activity stood clearly apart. The number of times a child changed hammers was even greater and reached 22 times in the 4-5 years old children, but dropped to 10.5 times in the 12-13 years old group.
