On the psychological origins of tool use

Madhur Mangalam; Dorothy M Fragaszy; Jeffrey B Wagman; Brian M Day; Damian G Kelty-Stephen; Raoul M Bongers; Dietrich W Stout; François Osiurak

doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104521

On the psychological origins of tool use

Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2022 Mar:134:104521. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104521. Epub 2022 Jan 5.

Authors

Madhur Mangalam¹, Dorothy M Fragaszy², Jeffrey B Wagman³, Brian M Day⁴, Damian G Kelty-Stephen⁵, Raoul M Bongers⁶, Dietrich W Stout⁷, François Osiurak⁸

Affiliations

¹ Department of Physical Therapy, Movement and Rehabilitation Science, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, USA. Electronic address: m.mangalam@northeastern.edu.
² Department of Psychology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA.
³ Department of Psychology, Illinois State University, Normal, IL 61761, USA.
⁴ Department of Psychology, Butler University, Indianapolis, IN 46208, USA.
⁵ Department of Psychology, State University of New York-New Paltz, New Paltz, NY 12561, USA.
⁶ Department of Human Movement Sciences, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, 9713 GZ Groningen, Netherlands.
⁷ Department of Anthropology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA.
⁸ Laboratoire d'Etude des Mécanismes Cognitifs, Université de Lyon, Lyon 69361, France; Institut Universitaire de France, Paris 75231, France.

PMID: 34998834
DOI: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104521

Abstract

The ubiquity of tool use in human life has generated multiple lines of scientific and philosophical investigation to understand the development and expression of humans' engagement with tools and its relation to other dimensions of human experience. However, existing literature on tool use faces several epistemological challenges in which the same set of questions generate many different answers. At least four critical questions can be identified, which are intimately intertwined-(1) What constitutes tool use? (2) What psychological processes underlie tool use in humans and nonhuman animals? (3) Which of these psychological processes are exclusive to tool use? (4) Which psychological processes involved in tool use are exclusive to Homo sapiens? To help advance a multidisciplinary scientific understanding of tool use, six author groups representing different academic disciplines (e.g., anthropology, psychology, neuroscience) and different theoretical perspectives respond to each of these questions, and then point to the direction of future work on tool use. We find that while there are marked differences among the responses of the respective author groups to each question, there is a surprising degree of agreement about many essential concepts and questions. We believe that this interdisciplinary and intertheoretical discussion will foster a more comprehensive understanding of tool use than any one of these perspectives (or any one of these author groups) would (or could) on their own.

Keywords: Affordance; Dexterity; Perception; Technical reasoning; Tooling.

Publication types

Review

MeSH terms

Humans
Knowledge
Tool Use Behavior*