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

Visually guided planning is fundamental for manual actions on 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. We found that 3- to 5-year-old children (n = 23) who exhibited visually guided, multi-step planning in a structured tool-use task (hammering down a peg) also demonstrated visually guided planning during unstructured free play while interlocking Duplo bricks and Squigz pieces. Children who exhibited visually guided planning in the hammering task also spent more time looking at the to-be-grasped free-play object and at their construction during reach and transport compared with children who did not demonstrate multi-step planning in the hammering task. Moreover, visually guided planning in the Duplo and Squigz tasks was positively correlated, indicating that planning generalizes across contexts. Findings show that visually guided planning in young children generalizes across different manual actions on objects, including structured tool use and unstructured free play.