Children plan manual actions similarly in directed tasks and in free play

Visually-guided planning is fundamental for manual actions involving multiple objects. Multi-step planning—when only the requirements for the initial action are directly visible in the scene—necessitates initial visual guidance to optimize the subsequent actions. Here, we tested whether preschoolers (3- to 5-year-olds, n = 23) who exhibited multi-step planning in a structured hammering task also demonstrated visually-guided planning during unstructured free play while interlocking Duplo blocks and Squigz pieces. Children who demonstrated visually-guided planning in multi-step hammering task also spent more time looking at the to-be-grasped object and at their construction during reach and transport, compared to children who did not demonstrate visually-guided planning in the hammering task. Moreover, visually guided planning was positively correlated in the Duplo and Squigz tasks, indicating that planning generalizes across contexts. Our findings indicate that young children generalize visually-guided planning across different multi-object manual tasks, including self-directed, spontaneous, manual actions.