Building Tool Use From Object Manipulation: A Perception–Action Perspective

Abstract

Tools are a universal feature of human culture. While most past research on tool use has focused on its cognitive underpinnings, in the present article we adopt a perception-action approach to understand how tool use emerges in early development. In this context, we review our work on infant object banging and how it may serve as a motor substrate for percussive tool use. Our results suggest that infants use banging to act on environmental surfaces selectively. Additionally, with increasing age, banging becomes more controlled and manifests many characteristics associated with skilled hammering. Taken together, the results suggest that there is much to be gained from considering the emergence of tool use as an ongoing process of perceptuomotor adaptation to handheld objects.