The cognitive bases of human tool use

This article has two goals. The first is to assess, in the face of accruing reports on the ingenuity of great ape tool use, whether and in what sense human tool use still evidences unique, higher cognitive ability. To that effect, I offer a systematic comparison between humans and nonhuman primates...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Behavioral and brain sciences Vol. 35; no. 4; pp. 203 - 218
Main Author Vaesen, Krist
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York, USA Cambridge University Press 01.08.2012
Subjects
Animal cognition
Animals
Biological and medical sciences
Biological Evolution
Brain
Cognition
Cognition. Intelligence
Cognitive ability
Executive Function
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Hand eye coordination
Handedness
Hominidae
Human subjects
Humans
Language
Learning
Miscellaneous
Monkeys & apes
Motor ability
Population
Primates
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Psychomotor Performance
Social Behavior
Social discrimination learning
Technology
Tool use
Tool Use Behavior
evolution
great apes
technology
cumulative culture
cognition
tool use
Human
Vertebrata
Mammalia
Animal
Biological evolution
Use
Cognitive ability
Monkey
Primates
Cognition
Tool
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Summary:This article has two goals. The first is to assess, in the face of accruing reports on the ingenuity of great ape tool use, whether and in what sense human tool use still evidences unique, higher cognitive ability. To that effect, I offer a systematic comparison between humans and nonhuman primates with respect to nine cognitive capacities deemed crucial to tool use: enhanced hand-eye coordination, body schema plasticity, causal reasoning, function representation, executive control, social learning, teaching, social intelligence, and language. Since striking differences between humans and great apes stand firm in eight out of nine of these domains, I conclude that human tool use still marks a major cognitive discontinuity between us and our closest relatives. As a second goal of the paper, I address the evolution of human technologies. In particular, I show how the cognitive traits reviewed help to explain why technological accumulation evolved so markedly in humans, and so modestly in apes.
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ISSN:0140-525X
1469-1825
1469-1825
DOI:10.1017/S0140525X11001452