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As online learning becomes a recurrent component of higher education, there have been growing interests in the interaction between students and educational resources within digital environments so as to understand and facilitate students’ initiative in managing those resources. The present study is an explorative inquiry into the relationships between students’ self-reported preferences of study materials, their actual usage of those materials and their learning performances in online learning. It focuses on analysing the learning management system’s log files, test results and students’ responses to an evaluative survey of a bachelor business course at a large Belgian university, which was a blended course turned fully online due to the pandemic circumstance. The first research question concerns how preferences relate to the usage of materials. A cluster analysis was conducted to classify students based on their perceived interest and actual access to learning resources. The results show three clusters of students with different preferences and levels of usage towards the four types of study materials provided in the course. However, the majority showed strong favour for multimedia online learning, with Web lectures being prioritised both in perception and access behaviour, while discussion boards receive mixed opinions and the lowest actual participation. The second question follows these up by linking the preference–usage patterns with academic performances. A multivariate analysis of variance was conducted to compare the learning performances of students with different preference–usage patterns. The results show no significant differences, which means the students’ preferences and/or usage of study materials has little to no impact on their learning performances in the online course. ispartof: European Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning vol:25 issue:1 pages:16-30 status: Published online

The present paper provides an integrative theory of actions and motor programs for skill in tool use, construction, and language. We analyze preconditions for action as well as making their effects (postconditions) explicit, emphasizing the “how” of action details as well as the “what” of motor programs, aided by conceptual analysis of several brain modeling efforts. The theory is exemplified by analysis of the subtractive construction involved in percussive tooling by capuchin monkeys and Oldowan and Acheulean stone tool by protohumans making before turning to the additive construction of hafted tools. A complementary analysis focused on the construction of bird nests explores the notion of “image” and “stage” in construction. We offer a brief comparison with birdsong before arguing for a very different relation between communication and construction in humans. Pantomime lifts manipulation from practical to communicative action in protohumans, and we consider the role of pedagogy before offering hypotheses on the emergence of human language that suggest how language may have evolved from manual skills. We note that language provides an open-ended means for devising innovations in tool use and construction, but reiterate the importance of this framework for diverse future studies in ethology and comparative psychology. Publisher PDF

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulties with tool use and pantomime actions. The current study utilized functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to examine the neural mechanisms underlying these gestural difficulties. Thirty-one children with and without ASD (age (mean ± SE) = 11.0 ± 0.6) completed a naturalistic peg-hammering task using an actual hammer (hammer condition), pantomiming hammering actions (pantomime condition), and performing meaningless actions with similar joint motions (meaningless condition). Children with ASD exhibited poor praxis performance (praxis error: TD = 17.9 ± 1.7; ASD = 27.0 ± 2.6, p < 0.01), which was significantly correlated with their cortical activation (R = 0.257 to 0.543). Both groups showed left-lateralized activation, but children with ASD demonstrated more bilateral activation during all gestural conditions. Compared to typically developing children, children with ASD showed hyperactivation of the inferior parietal lobe and hypoactivation of the middle/inferior frontal and middle/superior temporal regions. Our findings indicate intact technical reasoning (typical left-IPL activation) but atypical visuospatial and proprioceptive processing (hyperactivation of the right IPL) during tool use in children with ASD. These results have important implications for clinicians and researchers, who should focus on facilitating/reducing the burden of visuospatial and proprioceptive processing in children with ASD. Additionally, fNIRS-related biomarkers could be used for early identification through early object play/tool use and to examine neural effects following gesture-based interventions.

International audience; User interfaces typically feature tools to act on objects and rely on the ability of users to discover or learn how to interact with them. Previous work in HCI has used the Theory of Affordances to explain how users understand the possibilities for action in digital environments. A complementary theory from cognitive neuroscience, Technical Reasoning, posits that users accumulate abstract knowledge of object properties and technical principles known as mechanical knowledge, essential in tool use. Drawing from this theory, we introduce interaction knowledge as the "mechanical" knowledge of digital environments. We provide evidence of its relevance by reporting on an experiment where participants performed tasks in a digital environment with ambiguous possibilities for interaction. We analyze how interaction knowledge was transferred across two digital domains, text editing and graphical editing, and conclude that interaction knowledge models an essential type of knowledge for interacting in the digital world. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → HCI theory, concepts and models.

本稿は，ヒトの進化過程におけるヒトの情報行動の形成を概観することを目的とした．その結果，本研究においては，ヒトの進化および情報行動の形成を方向付けた要因として次の2つの要因が指摘された．ひとつは，乾燥化および寒冷化という環境の変化の要因である．もうひとつは，ヒトの生態学的地位の低さという要因である．ヒトは，この生態学的地位の低さを，道具の使用および集団の形成という2つの行為で克服し，環境の変化を生き延びた．そして，本研究においては，道具の使用および集団の形成は，発声器官を変化させ，言語を複雑化させ，社会的知性を発達させ，ヒトの脳を進化させたとの考察がなされた．, The purpose of this paper was to review the formation of human information behavior in the human evolutionary process. The results revealed that two factors—namely, environmental change characterized by aridification and cold weather and the low ecological status of humans—directed the evolution of humans and the formation of information behavior. Typically, humans overcame this problem of low ecological status by engaging in two behaviors—the use of tools and the formation of groups—to survive the environmental changes. The implication of these findings is that the use of tools and the formation of groups brought about changes in the vocal organs, increased language complexity, developed social intelligence, and facilitated the evolution of the human brain., 特集 中河 伸俊名誉教授 定年退職記念

Acquiring mathematical skills is considered a key challenge for modern Artificial Intelligence systems. Inspired by the way humans discover numerical knowledge, here we introduce a deep reinforcement learning framework that allows to simulate how cognitive agents could gradually learn to solve arithmetic problems by interacting with a virtual abacus. The proposed model successfully learn to perform multi-digit additions and subtractions, achieving an error rate below 1% even when operands are much longer than those observed during training. We also compare the performance of learning agents receiving a different amount of explicit supervision, and we analyze the most common error patterns to better understand the limitations and biases resulting from our design choices., Accepted at Northern Lights Deep Learning Conference 2023

International audience; This quantitative review gives an overview of physical understanding (i.e., the ability to represent and use the laws of physics to interact with the physical world) impairments in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), semantic dementia (SD), and corticobasal syndrome (CBS), as assessed mainly with mechanical problem-solving and tool use tests. This review shows that: (1) SD patients have apraxia of tool use because of semantic tool knowledge deficits, but normal performance in tests of physical understanding; (2) AD and CBS patients show impaired performance in mechanical problem-solving tests, probably not because of intrinsic deficits of physical understanding, but rather because of additional cognitive (AD) or motor impairments (CBS); (3) As a result, the performance in mechanical problem-solving tests is not a good predictor of familiar tool use in dementia; (4) Actual deficits of physical understanding are probably observed only in late stages of neurodegenerative diseases, and associated with functional loss.

Background Training a non-dominant hand is important for rehabilitating people who are required to change handedness. However, improving the dexterity in using chopsticks with a non-dominant hand through training remains unclear. This study is aimed to measure whether chopstick training improves non-dominant hand chopstick operation skills and leads to acquisition of skill levels similar to those of the dominant hand. Methods This single-blinded randomized controlled trial enrolled 34 healthy young right-handed subjects who scored >70 points on the Edinburgh Handedness Questionnaire Inventory. They were randomly allocated to training or control groups. The training group participated in a 6-week chopstick training program with the non-dominant left hand, while the control group did not. Asymmetry of chopstick operation skill, perceived psychological stress, and oxygen-hemoglobin concentration as a brain activity measure in each hemisphere were measured before and after training. Results Participants in the training group had significantly lower asymmetry than those in the control group during the post-training assessment (F[1,30] ≥ 5.54, p ≤ 0.03, partial η 2 ≥ 0.156). Only perceived psychological stress had a significantly higher asymmetry during the post-training assessment (t[15] = 3.81, p < 0.01). Conclusion Six weeks of chopstick training improved non-dominant chopstick operation skills, and a performance level similar to that of the dominant hand was acquired.

Why does one need creativity? On a personal level, improvisation with available resources is needed for online coping with unforeseen environmental stimuli when existing knowledge and apparent action strategies do not work. On a cultural level, the exploitation of existing cultural means and norms for the deliberate production of novel and valuable artifacts is a basis for cultural and technological development and extension of human action possibilities across various domains. It is less clear, however, how creativity develops and how exactly one arrives at generating new action possibilities and producing multiple alternative action strategies using familiar objects. In this theoretical paper, we first consider existing accounts of the creative process in the Alternative Uses Task and then present an alternative interpretation, drawing on sociocultural views and an embodied cognition approach. We explore similarities between the psychological processes underlying the generation of new uses in the Alternative Uses Task and children’s pretend play. We discuss possible cognitive mechanisms and speculate how the generation of new action possibilities for common objects in pretend play can be related to adults’ ability to generate new action strategies associated with object use. Implications for creativity development in humans and embodied artificial agents are discussed.

Tool innovation study to investigate the role of pedagogical cues and peers on innovation rates in 4- to 6-year-old German children.

A growing body of research suggests that performing actions can distort the perception of size, distance, and other visual information. These distortions have been observed under a variety of circumstances, and appear to persist in perception and memory. However, it is unclear whether these distortions persist as observers move to new viewpoints. To address this issue, the present study assessed whether action-specific distortions persist across changes in viewpoint. Participants viewed an object that was projected onto a table, then reached for it with their index finger or a reach-extending tool. After reaching for the object, participants remained stationary or moved to a new viewpoint, then estimated the object’s distance from their current viewpoint. When participants remained stationary, using a reach-extending tool led them to report shorter distance estimates. However, when participants moved to a new viewpoint, these distortions were eliminated. Similar effects were observed when participants produced different types of movement, including when participants rotated in place, moved to a new location, or simply walked in place. Together, these findings suggest that action-specific distortions are eliminated when observers move and perform other actions.

Solving problems in the real world is critical for survival and everyday function. Real-world environments are not predictable but full of new situations and unexpected difficulties and we must learn to solve problems efficiently and adaptively. Unlike associative learning and stimulus generalization, solving problems in an unpredictable environment involves acquiring tools to plan and take appropriate actions on the fly. A central aspect to navigate this environment is having an understanding of the world’s physical dynamics. Previous work used tool-use as a model system to understand factors that facilitate how humans learn to solve new problems . In this experiment, we test the role of variability in training and the impact of positive reward versus penalties for error to solve problems adaptively in young and elderly adults (18-35 and over 65).

The article processing charge was funded by the Baden-Wuerttemberg Ministry of Science, Research and Culture and the Nuertingen-Geislingen University in the funding program Open Access Publishing. Tool use has not yet been confirmed in horses, mules or donkeys. As this subject is difficult to research with conventional methods, we used a crowdsourcing approach to gather data. We contacted equid owners and carers and asked them to report and video examples of "unusual" behaviour via a dedicated website. We also searched YouTube and Facebook for videos of equids showing tool use. From 635 reports, including 1014 behaviours, we found 20 cases of tool use, 13 of which were unambiguous in that it was clear that the behaviour was not trained, caused by reduced welfare, incidental or accidental. We then assessed (a) the effect of management conditions on tool use and (b) whether the animals used tools alone, or socially, involving other equids or humans. We found that management restrictions were associated with corresponding tool use in 12 of the 13 cases ( = 0.01), e.g., equids using sticks to scrape hay within reach when feed was restricted. Furthermore, 8 of the 13 cases involved other equids or humans, such as horses using brushes to groom others. The most frequent tool use was for foraging, with seven examples, tool use for social purposes was seen in four cases, and there was just one case of tool use for escape. There was just one case of tool use for comfort, and in this instance, there were no management restrictions. Equids therefore can develop tool use, especially when management conditions are restricted, but it is a rare occurrence. Publisher PDF

A powerful idea put forward in the recent philosophy of science literature is that scientific models are best understood as instruments, tools or, more generally, artifacts. This idea has thus far been developed in combination with the more traditional representational approach: accordingly, current artifactualist accounts treat models asrepresentationaltools. But artifactualism and representationalism are independent views, and adopting one does not require acceptance of the other. This paper argues that a leaner version of artifactualism, free of representationalist assumptions, is both desirable and viable. Taking seriously the idea that models are artifacts can help us philosophically to make sense of how and why scientific modeling works even without reference to representation.

Most neuroimaging experiments that investigate how tools and their actions are represented in the brain use visual paradigms where tools or hands are displayed as 2D images and no real movements are performed. These studies discovered selective visual responses in occipito-temporal and parietal cortices for viewing pictures of hands or tools, which are assumed to reflect action processing, but this has rarely been directly investigated. Here, we examined the responses of independently visually defined category-selective brain areas when participants grasped 3D tools. Using real action fMRI and multi-voxel pattern analysis, we found that grasp typicality representations (i.e., whether a tool is being grasped appropriately for use) were decodable from hand-selective areas in occipito-temporal and parietal cortices, but not from tool-, object-, or body-selective areas, even if partially overlapping. Importantly, these effects were exclusive for actions with tools, but not for biomechanically matched actions with control nontools. In addition, decoding of grasp typicality was significantly higher in hand than tool-selective parietal regions. Notably, grasp typicality representations were automatically evoked even when there was no requirement for tool use and participants were naïve to object category (tool vs non-tools). Finding a specificity for typical tool grasping in hand-, rather than tool-, selective regions challenges the long-standing assumption that brain activation for viewing tool images reflects sensorimotor processing linked to tool manipulation. Instead our results show that typicality representations for tool grasping are automatically evoked in visual regions specialised for representing the human hand, the brain’s primarytoolfor interacting with the world.Significance StatementThe unique ability of humans to manufacture and use tools is unsurpassed across the animal kingdom, with tool use considered a defining feature of our species. Most neuroscientific studies that investigate the brain mechanisms that support tool use, record brain activity while people simply view images of tools or hands and not when people perform actual hand movements with tools. Here we show that specific areas of the human visual system that preferentially process hands automatically encode how to appropriately grasp 3D tools, even when no actual tool use is required. These findings suggest that visual areas optimized for processing hands represent fundamental aspects of tool grasping in humans, such as which side they should be grasped for correct manipulation.

G.L.V., A.L., E.B., N.M and A.W. were funded by the John Templeton Foundation (Grant ID: 40128 to A.W. and K. Laland). Support for the chimpanzee colony came from NIH U42-OD-011197. Humans are distinctive in their dependence upon products of culture for survival, products that have evolved cumulatively over generations such that many cannot now be created by a single individual. Why the cultural capacity of humans appears unrivalled in the animal kingdom is a topic of ongoing debate. Here we explore whether innovation and/or social learning propensities may constrain the ability of one of our closest living relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), to master an extractive foraging and tool-use task designed to afford opportunities for cumulative culture to develop. We further explore the potential demographic characteristics associated with novel task solutions. Chimpanzees (N = 53) were inventive, flexibly exploring the novel task, albeit complex inventions were rare and shaped by prior individual experience with similar tool-use tasks. However, they displayed no evidence of cumulative cultural learning. Communities displayed richer behavioral repertoires and had greater task success than chimpanzees tested in an asocial control condition, but their solution complexity did not surpass what individuals invented. The lack of social transmission of complex and beneficial solutions in contexts like those we studied provides one explanation for the limited cumulative culture observed in this species. Postprint

Humans use tools with specific functions to solve tasks more efficiently. However, functional specialization often comes at a cost: It can hinder the production of actions that are not usually performed with those tools, thus resulting in a fixation effect (functional fixedness). Little is known about whether our closest living relatives, the nonhuman great apes, are vulnerable to this detrimental effect of experience. We examined whether great apes from 4 species (N = 35) would become fixated on the familiar action with an object. More precisely, some subjects experienced a novel food item (grissini), either whole or broken into pieces, whereas others did not. Then, subjects faced a task that required them to use the food item to rake in an out-of-reach food reward. Results indicated that all 4 species could use a food item as a tool. Apes were more likely to do so in the first trial when they had not experienced the tool as food before, even though they tasted the food before using it as a tool. Orangutans and bonobos used the food item more often as a tool than chimpanzees. A preference test ruled out that performance was dependent on individual or species food preferences. Our results suggest that apes might have represented one object in two different ways (i.e., as "food" and as "tool") and then became fixated on one of these two representations. However, it is unclear whether the fixation occurred because of the item's prior function or its identity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Tool use pervades our everyday life. We spontaneously manipulate objects as tools, sometimes for tasks beyond their assigned function, thereby re-purposing them, such as when a knife is used as a screwdriver. The Technical Reasoning hypothesis in cognitive neuroscience posits that humans engage in tool use by reasoning about mechanical interactions among objects. By modeling tool use based on abstract knowledge about object interactions, this theory explains how tools can be re-purposed for tasks beyond their original design as a product of knowledge transfer. In digital environments, user interfaces often provide tools with pre-defined functions, such as formatting, scrolling or zooming, meant to be used for a specific set of tasks. However, the literature offers examples of users re-purposing digital tools in unexpected ways. This motivated me to investigate the Technical Reasoning hypothesis as a theoretical model for digital tool use, based on the users’ acquired knowledge of the digital world. First, I studied computer users performing a task in a digital text editor while being constrained to re-purpose some of its commands. While most participants managed to re-purpose at least one command, some experienced difficulty due to biases stemming from their knowledge of procedures and functions learned from similar environments. I relate these observations to phenomena of physical tool use, particularly, technical reasoning and functional fixedness. Next, I studied how users perceive the possibilities for action on digital objects through toolbars in the interface. Using an experimental environment whose objects support both graphics- and text-oriented commands, I controlled the visibility of corresponding toolbars to introduce the environment to participants before performing tasks with both toolbars available. This resulted in strategies where the preferred command types associated with the toolbar presented in the introduction, sugg esting a priming effect, which can hinder the exercise of technical reasoning to use alternative and possibly more efficient strategies. Last, I present a collaboration study about extreme users of text editing tools that led to the design of Textlets: interactive objects that reify text selections into persistent tools for text documents. Textlets constitute a generative concept building on principles of Instrumental Interaction. We observed a user re-purposing a Textlet during an evaluation study, supporting the notion that an instrumental approach may contribute to re-purpose digital tools. This thesis provides evidence of the relevance of the Technical Reasoning hypothesis as a theoretical model for interaction and opens the way to the design of tool-centric interfaces.; L’usage d’outils est un phénomène omniprésent dans nos vies. Nous nous servons d’objets comme outils, parfois au-delà des fonctions qui leur sont assignées, à l’instar d’un couteau qui serait utilisé comme tournevis. Selon l’hypothèse du Raisonnement Technique en neuroscience cognitive, les humains font l’usage d’outils en raisonnant sur les interactions mécaniques entre objets. En considérant ce phénomène comme reposant sur les propriétés physiques des objets, cette théorie explique les transferts de connaissances entre interactions objet-objet similaires, donnant une interprétation à l’usage d’un outil à des fins autres que celles qui ont motivées son invention. Dans les environnements numériques, les interfaces utilisateurs contiennent fréquemment des outils avec des fonctions prédéfinies, par exemple, pour formater un texte, défiler un document ou "zoomer" sur une image. Ces outils sont conçus à des fins spécifiques. Cependant, la littérature en IHM met en avant des exemples avec des utilisateurs qui font usage des outils numériques de manières inattendues. Dans cette thèse, j'étudie l’hypothèse du raisonnement technique comme modèle théorique pour comprendre l’usage d’outils numériques, pour leur fonction propre et inattendue. Ceci sur la base des notions que les utilisateurs ont formé du monde numérique. Je commence par décrire une expérience avec des utilisateurs remplissant une même tâche plusieurs fois avec un éditeur de texte, en réduisant progressivement les commandes auxquelles ils ont accès afin d’effectuer cette tâche. Cette méthodologie force les utilisateurs à utiliser une ou plusieurs commandes pour des fonctions inattendues. Alors que la plupart des participants sont arrivés à réaffecter a u moins une commande pour une fonction non prévue, certains ont exprimé des difficultés liées aux biais issus de leur connaissance dans des environnements similaires. Ces observations sont mises en lien avec des phénomènes similaires dans l’usage d’outils physiques, en particulier, la notion de “fixité fonctionnelle” et le raisonnement technique. Ensuite, je présente une étude sur les interprétations que les utilisateurs font des possibilités d’action sur les objets dans un environnement numérique à partir de son interface, et en particulier ses barres d’outils. Je m’intéresse aux objets graphiques et textuels. J’ai développé un environnement spécifique dont les objets peuvent être modifiés tant avec les commandes graphiques qu’avec les commandes textuelles. L’environnement possède deux barres d'outils correspondant aux deux types de commandes. Les participants doivent effectuer une série de tâches e n utilisant les commandes disponibles dans les barres d’outils. Les participants ont montré une tendance à utiliser les commandes de la barre d'outils présentée pendant l’introduction, suggérant un effet d’amorçage qui pourrait empêcher l’exercice du raisonnement technique pour trouver des stratégies alternatives et éventuellement plus efficaces. Finalement, je présente une étude sur des utilisateurs professionnels en édition de texte informant la conception des "Textlets", des objets interactifs qui réifient les sélections de texte comme des outils persistants dans l’édition d’un document. Les textlets représentent un concept génératif qui capitalise sur les principes de l’interaction instrumentale. L'étude a montré l’usage d'un textlet de façon écartée de sa conception originale, ce qui suggère qu’une approche instrumentale peut contribuer à l'utilisation d’outils nume ́riques au-delà des fonctions initialement imaginées. Cette thèse apporte des éléments empiriques montrant la pertinence de l’hypothèse du raisonnement technique comme modèle théorique d’interaction et ouvre la voie à la conception d’interfaces utilisateurs centrées sur des outils et des principes généraux liés aux propriétés "mécaniques" des objets numériques

This article relates a case study on how a conversation with materials and diagrams – the actual use of materials and diagrams to think, imagine, explain, collaborate, design and build – featured a certain kind of interplay between material and digital components. The physical components present in this setting included a water wheel, which is a wheel driven by flow of water whose rotational motion is a classic example of chaotic dynamics regulated by Lorenz equations. Digital components allowed for real-time graphical displays corresponding to the turning of the water wheel. We selected for this article a sequence of episodes from an interview with Jake, an undergraduate student majoring in engineering. Through a micro-ethnographic analysis, we reflect on how Jake combined the responsiveness of the digital displays with the tangibility of the water wheel to gain insight into some of the intricacies of oscillatory motion.

Objectives Acquiring tool‐assisted foraging skills can potentially improve dietary quality and increase fitness for wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). In contrast to chimpanzees in East and West Africa, chimpanzees in the Congo Basin use tool sets and brush‐tipped fishing probes to gather termites. We investigated the ontogeny of these tool skills in chimpanzees of the Goualougo Triangle, Republic of Congo, and compared it to that for chimpanzees at Gombe, Tanzania. We assessed whether chimpanzees acquired simple tool behaviors and single tool use before more complex actions and sequential use of multiple tool types. Materials and Methods Using a longitudinal approach, we scored remote video footage to document the acquisition of termite‐gathering critical elements for 25 immature chimpanzees at Goualougo. Results All chimpanzees termite fished by 2.9 years but did not manufacture brush‐tipped probes until an average of 4.3 years. Acquisition of sequential tool use extended into juvenility and adolescence. While we did not detect significant sex differences, most critical elements except tool manufacture were acquired slightly earlier by females. Discussion These findings contrast with Gombe, where chimpanzees learn to both use and make fishing probes between ages 1.5–3.5 and acquire the complete task by age 5.5. Differences between sites could reflect tool material selectivity and design complexity, the challenge of sequential tool behaviors, and strength requirements of puncturing subterranean termite nests at Goualougo. These results illustrate how task complexity may influence the timing and sequence of skill acquisition, improving models of the ontogeny of tool behavior among early hominins who likely used complex, perishable technologies., Chimpanzees at Goualougo learned tool use before brush‐tipped probe manufacture.Simple actions involving single tools were acquired before more complex sequences.The sequence and timing of skill acquisition differed between Goualougo and Gombe.

When chimpanzees (and other animals) use tools to pound, crack open, retrieve, soak up, pry apart, probe into, and/or dig up other objects (just to name a few of the operations of which they are capable), are these actions modulated by higher-order, structural, role-based representations of , , , and so forth? We report a study that was designed to shed light on what chimpanzees understand about and between objects. We presented expert tool-using chimpanzees with very familiar objects (ropes) in a very familiar testing context (hooking and retrieving an object containing food). We investigated whether they could transfer the known operation (hooking and pulling) to two distinct setups involving ropes (a looped rope that could effectuate the transfer of force, and a draped length of rope that could not¾unless both ends were grasped at the same time). We show that first-order, perceptually-based relational reasoning is both necessary and sufficient to explain not only the impressive pattern of results we did obtain, but any possible pattern of results we could have obtained. If correct, any claim that higher-order reasoning is necessary to explain the results of such a test would, by definition, be false. More importantly, we show that this is not an idiosyncratic limitation of this experiment. Instead, we show that all experimental protocols claiming to assay higher-order reasoning in animals rest upon an extremely suspect, and ultimately unprincipled, titration. Specifically, researchers implicitly assume that the tasks are perceptually similar enough to what their subjects have previously encountered to allow them make sense of the problem, but perceptually different enough that the subjects must (somehow) rely upon higher-order reasoning to navigate their way through it. We show why such assumptions are false.

The purpose of this study was to investigate Bornean orangutans’ ability to use water as a tool. In the floating object task, subjects must spit water into a vertical transparent tube to obtain an out-of-reach food reward (peanut). Two zoo-living orangutans were tested: Denda, a 13-year-old male, and Kumang, a 38-year-old female. Three conditions were presented: ‘wet’, in which the tube was quarter-filled with water; ‘dry – stick tools’, in which the tube had no water and six stick tools that were unnecessary for obtaining the reward were provided; and ‘dry’, in which the tube had no water and no stick tools were provided. Both subjects completed two sessions in each condition. The dry conditions were presented first because it is a cognitively more demanding task to use water to obtain the peanut when there is no water in the tube initially to provide a cue. Denda was successful in all six sessions while Kumang was successful in only three sessions. Both subjects’ latency to spit water into the tube decreased exponentially across sessions. Both individuals displayed a variety of strategies to solve the problem, including using and manufacturing tools utilizing objects in their enclosure. Denda is the first orangutan to succeed on the task when presented with the ‘dry’ condition first. This study provides the first evidence of Bornean orangutans spontaneously solving the floating object task, but the mechanism underlying their success remains unclear.

Povinelli (2000) published a series of careful studies probing chimpanzees’ understanding of physical causality in the book, “Folk Physics for Apes: The Chimpanzee’s theory of how the world works.” The studies and Povinelli’s conclusions regarding chimpanzee cognition had a significant impact on the field of comparative cognition. One enduring lesson from ‘Folk Physics’ was the importance of shifting from a success-testing model to a focus on understanding the mechanisms underlying subjects’ performance in research tasks. But have researchers fully embraced this lesson and has it translated to a better understanding of how other animals understand the world in the two decades that have followed? This special issue explores the evidence for causal understanding in a range of species, but it also reveals some changes in human understanding of nonhuman minds over the past 20 years

In line with the theory of event coding, many studies on tool use show that perceived visual and haptic information interacts with action execution. In two experiments, we investigated the temporal persistence of after-effects within an event file, and after-effects in temporally overlapping event files with the n-1 replication task. Each trial consisted of two phases: In phase 1, participants moved a cursor with a pen on a covered tablet while a gain varied the relation between hand and cursor amplitude (Experiment 1). In phase 2, participants replicated the hand amplitude of phase 1 of the previous trial without visual feedback. Any systematic over- and undershoot would be indicative for after-effects. When the cursor amplitude varied and the hand amplitude remained constant, we did not find any after-effects but adjustment of the internal model. For varying hand amplitudes, after-effects appeared in terms of a contrast and assimilation effect between temporally overlapping event files and within an event file, respectively. In Experiment 2, we confirmed that the observed pattern of over- and undershoots fully reflect assimilation/contrast due to perception-action interaction. The findings extend the current view on the temporal stability of short-term binding in sensorimotor transformation tasks: In the n-1 replication task, after-effects appeared only in trials with varying hand amplitudes. We replicated the contrast effect and assimilation effect, and the assimilation effect persisted for up to approximately 20 s.

Contains fulltext : 226706.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) People have a good intuition of how to move a computer mouse to place a cursor at a desired position on a screen. This is surprising because the hand and the mouse are at different locations and they generally move in different directions and over different distances. But using a computer mouse is not always intuitive: try positioning a cursor after turning the mouse by 90° in your hand. To examine when using a computer mouse is intuitive, we asked participants to move a cursor to targets on a screen by moving a mouse along a surface. We varied the orientation of this surface in space and that of the mouse in the hand. Participants performed best when the mapping between hand and cursor motion was close to what we are accustomed to, either in space or relative to the forearm. 4 p.

Spatial action–effect binding denotes the mutual attraction between the perceived position of an effector (e.g., one’s own hand) and a distal object that is controlled by this effector. Such spatial binding can be construed as an implicit measure of object ownership, thus the belonging of a controlled object to the own body. The current study investigated how different transformations of hand movements (body-internal action component) into movements of a visual object (body-external action component) affect spatial action–effect binding, and thus implicit object ownership. In brief, participants had to bring a cursor on the computer screen into a predefined target position by moving their occluded hand on a tablet and had to estimate their final hand position. In Experiment 1, we found a significantly lower drift of the proprioceptive position of the hand towards the visual object when hand movements were transformed into laterally inverted cursor movements, rather than cursor movements in the same direction. Experiment 2 showed that this reduction reflected an elimination of spatial action–effect binding in the inverted condition. The results are discussed with respect to the prerequisites for an experience of ownership over artificial, noncorporeal objects. Our results show that predictability of an object movement alone is not a sufficient condition for ownership because, depending on the type of transformation, integration of the effector and a distal object can be fully abolished even under conditions of full controllability.

Humans and chimpanzees both exhibit a diverse set of tool use skills which suggests selection for tool manufacture and use occurred in the common ancestors of the two species. Our group has previously reported phenotypic and genetic associations between tool use skill and gray matter covariation, as quantified by source-based morphometry (SBM), in chimpanzees. As a follow up study, here we evaluated repeatability in heritability in SBM components and their phenotypic association with tool use skill in two genetically independent chimpanzee cohorts. Within the two independent cohorts of chimpanzees, we identified 8 and 16 SBM components, respectively. Significant heritability was evident for multiple SBM components within both cohorts. Further, phenotypic associations between tool use performance and the SBM components were largely consistent between the two cohorts; the most consistent finding being an association between tool use performance and an SBM component including the posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS) and superior temporal gyrus (STG), and the interior and superior parietal regions (p < 0.05). These findings indicate that the STS, STG, and parietal cortices are phenotypically and genetically implicated in chimpanzee tool use abilities.

Animals on islands typically depart from their mainland relatives in assorted aspects of their biology. Because they seem to occur in concert, and to some extent evolve convergently in disparate taxa, these changes are referred to as the ‘island syndrome’. While morphological, physiological and life-history components of the island syndrome have received considerable attention, much less is known about how insularity affects behaviour. In this paper, we argue why changes in personality traits and cognitive abilities can be expected to form part of the island syndrome. We provide an overview of studies that have compared personality traits and cognitive abilities between island and mainland populations, or among islands. Overall, the pickings are remarkably slim. There is evidence that animals on islands tend to be bolder than on the mainland, but effects on other personality traits go either way. The evidence for effects of insularity on cognitive abilities or style is highly circumstantial and very mixed. Finally, we consider the ecological drivers that may induce such changes, and the mechanisms through which they might occur. We conclude that our knowledge of the behavioural and cognitive responses to island environments remains limited, and we encourage behavioural biologists to make more use of these ‘natural laboratories for evolution’.

Traditional and new disciplines converge in suggesting that the parietal lobe underwent a considerable expansion during human evolution. Through the study of endocasts and shape analysis,paleoneurologyhas shown an increased globularity of the braincase and bulging of the parietal region in modern humans, as compared to other human species, including Neandertals. Cortical complexity increased in both the superior and inferior parietal lobules. Emerging fields bridging archaeology and neuroscience supply further evidence of the involvement of the parietal cortex in human-specific behaviors related to visuospatial capacity, technological integration, self-awareness, numerosity, mathematical reasoning and language. Here, we complement these inferences on the parietal lobe evolution, with results from more classical neuroscience disciplines, such as behavioral neurophysiology, functional neuroimaging, and brain lesions; and apply these to define the neural substrates and the role of the parietal lobes in the emergence of functions at the core of material culture, such as tool-making, tool use and constructional abilities.

Associative Tool Use (ATU) describes the use of two or more tools in combination, with the literature further differentiating between Tool set use, Tool composite use, Sequential tool use and Secondary tool use. Research investigating the cognitive processes underlying ATU has shown that some primate and bird species spontaneously invent Tool set and Sequential tool use. Yet studies with humans are sparse. Whether children are also able to spontaneously invent ATU behaviours and at what age this ability emerges is poorly understood. We addressed this gap in the literature with two experiments involving preschoolers (E1,N= 66, 3 years 6 months to 4 years 9 months; E2,N= 119, 3 years 0 months to 6 years 10 months) who were administered novel tasks measuring Tool set, Metatool and Sequential tool use. Participants needed to solve the tasks individually, without the opportunity for social learning (except for enhancement effects). Children from 3 years of age spontaneously invented all of the types of investigated ATU behaviours. Success rates were low, suggesting that individual invention of ATU in novel tasks is still challenging for preschoolers. We discuss how future studies can use and expand our tasks to deepen our understanding of tool use and problem-solving in humans and non-human animals.

One of the most surprising features of our brain is the fact that it is extremely plastic. Among the various plastic processes supported by our brain, there is the neural representation of the space surrounding our body, the peripersonal space (PPS). The effects of real-world tool use on the PPS are well known in cognitive neuroscience, but little is still known whether similar mechanisms also govern virtual tool use. To this purpose, the present study investigated the plasticity of the PPS before and after a real (Experiment 1) or virtual motor training with a tool (Experiment 2). The results show the expansion of the PPS only following real-world tool use but not virtual use, highlighting how the two types of training potentially rely on different processes. This study enriches the current state of the art on the plasticity of PPS in real and virtual environments. We discuss our data with respect to the relevance for the development of effective immersive environment for trainings, learning and rehabilitation.

Social information use is well documented across the animal kingdom, but how it influences ecological and evolutionary processes is only just beginning to be investigated. Here we evaluate how social transmission may influence species interactions and potentially change or create novel selection pressures by focusing on predator-prey interactions, one of the best studied examples of species coevolution. There is extensive research into how prey can use social information to avoid predators, but little synthesis of how social transmission among predators can influence the outcome of different stages of predation. Here we review evidence that predators use social information during 1) encounter, 2) detection, 3) identification, 4) approach, 5) subjugation and 6) consumption. We use this predation sequence framework to evaluate the implications of social information use on current theoretical predictions about predator-prey dynamics, and find that social transmission has the potential to alter selection pressures for prey defences at each predation stage. This suggests that considering social interactions can help answer open questions about species coevolution, and also predict how populations and communities respond to rapid human-induced changes in the environment.

The way in which animals grasp objects to perform subsequent action execution allows studying their anticipatory abilities. We examined whether 11 capuchin monkeys (Sapajus spp.) were able to prospectively grasp a magnetic dowel to use it as a tool to retrieve a baited metallic container from a plexiglas box placed in front of them. We investigated whether and how initial dowel orientation (horizontal vs vertical) affected grasping and using the dowel to retrieve the container in two testing conditions: (1) 2-FE condition in which the dowel had two functional magnetic ends; (2) 1-FE condition in which the dowel had only one functional magnetic end. In the 2-FE condition, capuchins had to take into account the initial dowel orientation since both ends were functional, whereas in the 1-FE condition capuchins had also to take into account the initial functional end position when grasping the dowel. Capuchins were trained to grasp the dowel to put one functional end in contact with the metallic container. However, they did not learn to associate the functional end of the 1-FE dowel to successful retrieval. Capuchins showed better anticipatory planning (1) in 2-FE than in 1-FE condition and (2) when the dowel was initially positioned on the horizontal plane than on the vertical one. Moreover, hand preferences affected planning in the 1-FE condition. Results were discussed within the frameworks of primates’ abilities to use abstract cues and on their abilities to process functional features and spatial cues and to perform mental rotations.

This study investigated the end-state comfort (ESC) effect in adults with intellectual disabilities (ID). The ESC effect represents a tendency to maximize comfortable hand and arm postures at the end of an object manipulation task. Participants were 22 adults with non-specific ID. The ESC effect was assessed using a simple object manipulation task. Difficulties were found with manifestation of the ESC effect in adults with non-specific ID. Only four participants displayed the ESC effect. The participants’ intellectual function was correlated with expression of the ESC effect. These results were assessed in terms of competition between a goal-directed system and habitual systems in adults with ID.

Funding: This study was funded through a BBSRC David Phillips Fellowship (BB/G023913/1 and /2 to CR) and a PhD studentship from the BBSRC and the University of St Andrews (to BCK). During the final stages of manuscript preparation, CR was the grateful recipient of a Radcliffe Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, and a BBSRC grant (BB/S018484/1). The temporary storage and re-use of tools can significantly enhance foraging efficiency. New Caledonian crows in one of our study populations use two types of stick tools – hooked and non-hooked – which differ in raw material, manufacture costs, and foraging performance. Using a large sample of wild-caught, temporarily captive New Caledonian crows, we investigated experimentally whether individuals prefer one tool type over the other when given a choice and whether they take better care of their preferred tools between successive episodes of use, safely storing them underfoot or in nearby holes. Crows strongly preferred hooked stick tools made from Desmanthus virgatus stems over non-hooked stick tools. Importantly, this preference was also reflected in subsequent tool-handling behaviour, with subjects keeping hooked stick tools safe more often than non-hooked stick tools sourced from leaf litter. These results suggest that crows ‘value’ hooked stick tools, which are both costlier to procure and more efficient to use, more than non-hooked stick tools. Results from a series of control treatments suggested that crows altered their tool ‘safekeeping’ behaviour in response to a combination of factors, including tool type and raw material. To our knowledge, our study is the first to use safekeeping behaviour as a proxy for assessing how non-human animals value different tool types, establishing a novel paradigm for productive cross-taxonomic comparisons. Publisher PDF

International audience; Tool behavior might be based on two strategies associated with specific cognitive mechanisms: cued-learning and technical-reasoning strategies. We aimed to explore whether these strategies coexist in young children and whether they are manifest differently through development. We presented 216 3- to 9-year-olds with a vertical maze task consisting in moving a ball from the top to the bottom of a maze. Two tool-use/mechanical actions were possible: rotating action and sliding action. Three conditions were tested, each focused on a different strategy. In the Opaque–Cue condition (cued-learning strategy), children could not see the mechanical action of each tool. Nevertheless, a cue was provided according to the tool needed to solve the problem. In the Transparent–No Cue condition (technical-reasoning strategy), no cue was presented. However, children could see the mechanical actions associated with each tool. In the Transparent–Cue condition (cued-learning and/or technical-reasoning strategies) children saw both the mechanical actions and the cues. Results indicated that the Opaque–Cue and Transparent–Cue conditions were easier than the Transparent–No-Cue condition in all children. These findings stress that children can use either cued learning or technical reasoning to use tools, according to the available information. The behavioral pattern observed in the Transparent–Cue condition suggests that children might be inclined to use technical reasoning even when the task can be solved through cued learning.

Tool use is a hallmark of human evolution. Beyond its sensorimotor components, whose complexity has been extensively investigated, tool use impacts cognition. Tool use requires integrating an external object as a body part and embedding its functional structure in the motor program. Additionally, it has been proposed that brain areas involved in language have exapted neural resources devoted to tool use. Accordingly, researchers have advanced the existence of similarities between the processes underlying tool use and language, in line with the similarities for action and language suggested by the embodied cognition models. Thus, this thesis aims to further characterize the shared neural resources and reciprocal behavioral links between tool use and language. In a first study, we used functional neuroimaging to test the existence of shared neural resources between tool use and two linguistic processes: phonology and semantics. For phonology, the participants performed a phonological identification task, whereas for semantics they underwent a semantic priming task with a lexical decision. Although tool use and phonology recruited contiguous regions in the inferior parietal lobe, no evidence for shared neural resources was found between those two functions. By contrast, multivariate analyses showed that the neural activity elicited by semantics was decoded within the tool-use neural network, in the left inferior frontal gyrus and the left occipitotemporal cortex. In a second study, we tested the existence of shared neural substrates for tool use and syntactic processing. The participants performed a syntactic comprehension task requiring to process syntactic structures of different complexity. Results showed tool use and complex syntax (i.e. object relatives) elicited neural activity anatomically co-localized within the basal ganglia. Multivariate analyses revealed similar spatial distributions of neural patterns prompted by tool use and object relative processing. Moreover, the shared neurofunctional resources are reflected behaviorally by cross-domain learning transfer: tool-use training significantly improves linguistic performance for complex syntax, and reciprocally, complex syntax training improves motor performance with the tool. No learning transfer was observed on language syntactic abilities if participants trained without the tool, nor on tool use if participants trained with simpler syntactic structures (i.e. subject relatives). Our findings show the existence of shared neural resources between tool use and language, pointing to the existence of a supramodal syntactic function shared between the motor and the language domains. More generally our work opens perspectives to develop learning or rehabilitation protocols taking advantage of the crossdomain learning transfer. From an evolutionary point of view, our results reinforce the hypothesis of a co-evolution between tool use and language, leading to shared neural resources for these two abilities., L’utilisation d’outil est le produit de l’évolution humaine. En plus de sa composante sensorimotrice, dont la complexité est désormais bien caractérisée, l’habileté à utiliser un outil impacte la cognition. En effet, l’utilisation d’outil requiert d’intégrer un objet externe comme une partie corporelle, tout en incluant sa structure fonctionnelle dans le programme moteur. D’autre part, il a été proposé que les aires cérébrales impliquées dans le langage aient exploité les ressources neuronales dédiées à l’outil. Ainsi, les chercheurs ont avancé l’hypothèse de similarités entre les processus sous-tendant l’utilisation d’outil d’une part et le langage de l’autre, en plus des similarités entre action et langage auparavant suggérées par les modèles de la cognition incarnée. Ainsi, cette thèse vise à caractériser les ressources neuronales partagées et les liens comportementaux réciproques entre l’utilisation d’outil et le langage. Dans une première étude, nous avons utilisé la neuroimagerie fonctionnelle pour tester l’existence de ressources neuronales partagées entre l’utilisation d’outil et deux fonctions langagières : la phonologie et la sémantique. Pour la phonologie, les participant.e.s devaient réaliser une tâche d’identification phonologique, tandis que pour la sémantique, une tâche d’amorçage sémantique avec décision lexicale était réalisée. Bien que l’utilisation d’outil et la phonologie recrutent des régions corticales contigües du lobule pariétal inférieur, aucune preuve n’a été trouvée en faveur de ressources neuronales partagées entre ces deux fonctions. Des analyses multivariées ont en revanche montré que l’activité neuronale induite par la sémantique est décodée au sein du réseau neuronal de l’utilisation d’outil et plus particulièrement dans le gyrus frontal inférieur gauche et le cortex occipitotemporal gauche. Dans une seconde étude, nous avons testé l’existence de ressources partagées pour l’utilisation d’outil et la fonction syntaxique. Les participant·e·s devaient réaliser une tâche de compréhension syntaxique impliquant des phrases relatives de complexité différente. Les résultats ont montré que l’utilisation d’outil et la syntaxe complexe (i.e. relatives objet) induisaient une activité neuronale anatomiquement co-localisée au sein des ganglions de la base. De plus, des analyses multivariées ont révélé une distribution spatiale similaire pour les patterns neuronaux induits par l’utilisation d’outil et le traitement des relatives objet. En conséquence, le partage de ces ressources neurofonctionnelles se reflète au niveau comportemental par un transfert d’apprentissage entre les deux domaines : l’entrainement à l’utilisation d’outil améliore la performance linguistique pour la syntaxe complexe et réciproquement, l’entrainement à la syntaxe complexe améliore la performance motrice avec l’outil. Aucun transfert d’apprentissage n’a été observé pour les habilités syntaxiques après un entrainement équivalent mais sans outil, ou bien pour l’utilisation d’outil après entrainement avec des structures syntaxiques plus simples (i.e. relatives sujet). Nos résultats démontrent l’existence de ressources partagées entre utilisation d’outil et langage et indiquent l’existence d’une fonction syntaxique supramodale dédiée aux domaines moteur et langagier. Plus généralement, nos travaux ouvrent des perspectives quant à la mise en place des protocoles d’apprentissage ou de réhabilitation interdomaine tirant profit du transfert d’apprentissage. Nos résultats confortent enfin l’hypothèse d’une coévolution entre l’habileté à utiliser un outil et le langage, ayant favorisé le partage de ressources neuronales communes pour ces deux habiletés.

Simple Summary The welfare of captive animals is nowadays a topic of major concern. In order to express their natural behavioral repertoires, however, animals require complex environments and stimuli which are difficult to reproduce in captivity. To overcome this, environmental enrichment is considered one of the most successful tools to increase behavioral opportunities and enhance animal welfare. In this study, we explored whether providing an artificial termite-fishing task, and whether participation in this task, predicted changes in the solitary and social behavior of sanctuary-housed chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). We compared chimpanzee behavior when the enrichment was presented to different periods without enrichment. We found that the presence of the enrichment predicted an increase in tool use and feeding behavior and a decrease in inactivity, especially for those chimpanzees with higher participation. However, we did not detect significant changes in abnormal or self-directed behaviors. Furthermore, we found no variation in affiliation- or aggression-related behaviors, but social proximity increased in chimpanzees that participated more. Our results support previous studies demonstrating that artificial termite-fishing promotes species-typical behaviors in captive chimpanzees with no major effects on social activities. Abstract Artificial termite-fishing tasks are a common enrichment for captive great apes, promoting species-typical behaviors. Nonetheless, whether these activities are linked to changes in other behaviors and whether these changes persist over time has seldom been investigated. We assessed whether the use of an artificial termite-fishing task was linked to changes in the solitary behavior and social dynamics in two groups of sanctuary-housed chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Specifically, we compared chimpanzee behavior during eight enrichment sessions distributed over a two-month period, with similar periods before and after the introduction of the enrichment. Data were collected from combined interval and continuous sampling methods and were analyzed using generalized linear mixed models. We found that participation increased across sessions and that both enrichment and participation predicted an increase in tool use and feeding and a decrease in inactivity, which were all maintained throughout the sessions. Furthermore, participation was positively associated with social proximity, revealing a gathering effect of the task. However, neither enrichment nor participation were linked to changes in abnormal, self-directed, affiliation-related or aggression-related behaviors. Overall, our results support the hypothesis that artificial termite-fishing is a suitable enrichment for captive chimpanzees, maintaining the subjects’ interest and promoting species-typical behaviors, with no negative effects on social activities.

Funding: Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) (Grants BB/G023913/1 and BB/G023913/2 to C.R., and studentship to B.C.K.), the School of Biology at the University of St Andrews (studentships to M.P.S. and B.C.K.), and the Leverhulme Trust (Grant RPG-2015-273 to P.M.H.). Some animals fashion tools or constructions out of plant materials to aid foraging, reproduction, self-maintenance, or protection. Their choice of raw materials can affect the structure and properties of the resulting artifacts, with considerable fitness consequences. Documenting animals’ material preferences is challenging, however, as manufacture behavior is often difficult to observe directly, and materials may be processed so heavily that they lack identifying features. Here, we use DNA barcoding to identify, from just a few recovered tool specimens, the plant species New Caledonian crows (Corvus moneduloides) use for crafting elaborate hooked stick tools in one of our long-term study populations. The method succeeded where extensive fieldwork using an array of conventional approaches—including targeted observations, camera traps, radio-tracking, bird-mounted video cameras, and behavioral experiments with wild and temporarily captive subjects—had failed. We believe that DNA barcoding will prove useful for investigating many other tool and construction behaviors, helping to unlock significant research potential across a wide range of study systems. Publisher PDF

Novel problems often partially overlap with familiar ones. Some features match the qualities of previous situations stored in long-term memory and therefore trigger their retrieval. Using relevant, while inhibiting irrelevant, memories to solve novel problems is a hallmark of behavioral flexibility in humans and has recently been demonstrated in great apes. This capacity has been proposed to promote technical innovativeness and thus warrants investigations of such a mechanism in other innovative species. Here, we show that proficient tool—users among Goffin's cockatoos—an innovative tool—using species—could use a relevant previous experience to solve a novel, partially overlapping problem, even despite a conflicting, potentially misleading, experience. This suggests that selecting relevant experiences over irrelevant experiences guides problem solving at least in some Goffin's cockatoos. Our result supports the hypothesis that flexible memory functions may promote technical innovations.

Selection and transport of materials for tools is ubiquitous throughout our species’ evolutionary history. Yet our understanding of early human material culture is heavily skewed toward lithic technology. This poses challenges when reconstructing our technical origins, as organic raw materials, especially plants, likely played a significant role despite their absence from the record until 300 kya. Studies of plant-tool use by living apes can serve as a proxy to reconstruct such aspects of human behavior. Employing archaeological methods, we investigated raw material procurement for termite-fishing tools by three chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii ) populations in Tanzania: Gombe, Issa, and Mahale. All communities exploited plant sources from the immediate vicinity of termite mounds, as well as farther away, and reused them. However, at Issa, more parts were sourced per plant, with the number of removals decreasing as distance from the mound increased. These disparities are likely caused by environmental differences. Issa apes might try to minimize transport costs in what is a comparably more open and drier habitat with fewer suitable sources available near mounds. Despite similar raw material types being available, Issa and Mahale chimpanzees exclusively used bark for tool manufacture, while at Gombe, various materials were employed; these differences may reflect cultural variants. Our study highlights how environmental and cultural factors shape chimpanzee technology and identifies similarities to raw material selection processes inferred for Oldowan tool users. The archaeology of the perishable, even if at its infancy, is providing a new framework for reconstructing archaeologically invisible aspects of early human behavior and our own technological origins. Fil: d'Errico, F.. Universite de Bordeaux; Francia Fil: Backwell, Lucinda Ruth. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tucumán. Instituto Superior de Estudios Sociales. Universidad Nacional de Tucumán. Instituto Superior de Estudios Sociales; Argentina

In PNAS, Fayet et al. (1) report on two cases of tool use in a seabird. In two distant populations they recorded Arctic puffins ( Fratercula arctica ) using sticks to scratch themselves (Fig. 1). The documentation of tool use in this species expands the ever-growing list of tool-using birds through rare observations under natural conditions. Although it is neither the first observation of tool use in wild seabirds, nor the first of stick-tool use outside of a foraging context in wild birds, these findings contribute to the debate on the evolutionary and cognitive origins of tool use. Fig. 1. A puffin holding a stick in its beak before using it as a tool to scratch itself. Image courtesy of M. T. Ridoff (artist). Discoveries of tool use in animals attract considerable attention, because tool use remains rare in nature and people intuitively associate it with intelligence. Not long ago, the wielding of tools was considered a purely human affair. In the 1950s, when Jane Goodall observed wild chimpanzees fishing for termites, we realized that tool use does not exclusively define us. Since then, tool use has been observed in an increasing number of species, spanning from invertebrates to apes, but is still only found in fewer than 1% of known genera so far (2). From this perspective, every discovery of a tool-using species adds an important puzzle piece to understanding this fascinating, rare, and multifarious phenomenon (2⇓–4). In the traditional view, tool use reveals intelligence. Therefore, animal tool use has been regarded as one of few windows for studying the evolution of intelligence and our own evolutionary past. However, the picture today is more complex, and while tool use oftentimes does relate to advanced cognition, it is not always the case. The debate typically centers on what cognitive abilities … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: avbayern{at}orn.mpg.de. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

Significance Understanding social influences on how apes acquire tool behaviors can help us model the evolution of culture and technology in humans. Humans scaffold novice tool skills with diverse strategies, including the transfer of tools between individuals. Chimpanzees transfer tools, and this behavior meets criteria for teaching. However, it is unclear how task complexity relates to this form of helping. Here, we find differences between 2 wild chimpanzee populations in rate, probability, and types of tool transfer during termite gathering. Chimpanzees showed greater helping in the population where termite gathering is a more complex tool task. In wild chimpanzees, as in humans, regular and active provisioning of learning opportunities may be essential to the cultural transmission of complex skills., Cumulative culture is a transformative force in human evolution, but the social underpinnings of this capacity are debated. Identifying social influences on how chimpanzees acquire tool tasks of differing complexity may help illuminate the evolutionary origins of technology in our own lineage. Humans routinely transfer tools to novices to scaffold their skill development. While tool transfers occur in wild chimpanzees and fulfill criteria for teaching, it is unknown whether this form of helping varies between populations and across tasks. Applying standardized methods, we compared tool transfers during termite gathering by chimpanzees in the Goualougo Triangle, Republic of Congo, and in Gombe, Tanzania. At Goualougo, chimpanzees use multiple, different tool types sequentially, choose specific raw materials, and perform modifications that improve tool efficiency, which could make it challenging for novices to manufacture suitable tools. Termite gathering at Gombe involves a single tool type, fishing probes, which can be manufactured from various materials. Multiple measures indicated population differences in tool-transfer behavior. The rate of transfers and probability of transfer upon request were significantly higher at Goualougo, while resistance to transfers was significantly higher at Gombe. Active transfers of tools in which possessors moved to facilitate possession change upon request occurred only at Goualougo, where they were the most common transfer type. At Gombe, tool requests were typically refused. We suggest that these population differences in tool-transfer behavior may relate to task complexity and that active helping plays an enhanced role in the cultural transmission of complex technology in wild apes.

Novel problems often partially overlap with familiar ones. Some features match the qualities of previous situations stored in long-term memory and therefore trigger their retrieval. Using relevant, while inhibiting irrelevant, memories to solve novel problems is a hallmark of behavioral flexibility in humans and has recently been demonstrated in great apes. This capacity has been proposed to promote technical innovativeness and thus warrants investigations of such a mechanism in other innovative species. Here, we show that proficient tool—users among Goffin's cockatoos—an innovative tool—using species—could use a relevant previous experience to solve a novel, partially overlapping problem, even despite a conflicting, potentially misleading, experience. This suggests that selecting relevant experiences over irrelevant experiences guides problem solving at least in some Goffin's cockatoos. Our result supports the hypothesis that flexible memory functions may promote technical innovations.

Wild chimpanzee tool use is highly diverse and, in many cases, exhibits cultural variation: tool-use behaviours and techniques differ between communities and are passed down generations through social learning. Honey dipping – the use of sticks or leaves to extract honey from hives – has been identified across the whole species’ range. Nonetheless, there seems to be marked variation in honey dipping at a species level, with most descriptions originating from central Africa, and involving the use of complex tool sets, or even multifunctional tools. In West Africa, while honey consumption is common, in most cases tools are not used. We document, for the first time, the use of honey dipping tools in unhabituated chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes verus) communities at Cantanhez National Park (CNP), Guinea-Bissau. Over a 23-month period we employed a combination of direct (camera traps, n = 1944 camera trap days) and indirect (1000km of reconnaissance walks, collection of abandoned tools) methods to study four neighbouring communities in central CNP. Fluid dipping tools were found in three of the four communities; here we analyse 204 individual stick tools from the 70 tool-use ateliers found. In addition to documenting individual tool dimensions and raw materials, we adopt methods from primate archaeology to describe the typology of different tools based on use-wear patterns. We describe differences in tools used for different honey types, between communities, and tools and tool kits that show an unexpected degree of complexity. Our data also suggest the use of tool sets, i.e., tools with different functions used sequentially toward the same goal; as well as possible multifunction tools (pounding and dipping), never before described for western chimpanzees. Our study fills gaps in our knowledge of the wild chimpanzee cultural repertoire and highlights how chimpanzee tool manufacture and use can vary even at local scales.

In a previous study, chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, and capuchin monkeys faced a task that required the use of a rigid stick-like tool to displace an out-of-reach food reward, which was located outside the cage either hanging on a string (e.g., apes) or on a table (e.g., capuchins). Three unfamiliar stick-like tools were placed on a wooden platform for the subjects to choose. Testing consisted of two consecutive trials, each with the same set of tools. Previous to the test subjects learned about the rigidity of the tool either by handling the tools (manipulation), or by observing an experimenter bending and unbending them in sequence (observation); or did not receive any information since the three tools were presented lying on the platform (visual static). In the current study, we investigated whether failing to select the right type of tool in the first trial affected subjects' choices in the second trial. Results showed that when information about the tool rigidity was obtained before selection, great apes and capuchin monkeys changed options in their second choices. However, in the visual static condition, where no information about the rigidity of the tools had been provided before their selection, only great apes discarded wrong tool exemplars in their second trials benefitting from their own mistakes. In contrast, capuchin monkeys did not. We argue that lower attentional focus and lack of stimuli distinctiveness might account for capuchins monkeys' failure to benefit from their own experience. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).