Abstract
The acquisition of the concept of ‘tool’ remains intriguing from both developmental and comparative perspectives. Our current model of tool use development in children is based on humans’ supposedly unique ability to adopt a teleological stance: the understanding of a demonstrator’s goal-based intentions when using a tool. It is however unclear how children and chimpanzees, our closest relatives, combine their knowledge of different objects whose function is to act on other parts of the environment, and assign them to a single category of ‘tools’. Here, we used a function-based approach to address this question. We exposed 7 to 11-year-old children and adult chimpanzees to a Matching-to-Function (MTF) task to explore whether they would sort tools and non-tools separately after demonstration of their function by an experimenter. MTF is a variant of Matching-to-Sample where the sample and the target are from the same category/kind rather than identical. Around 40% of children paired objects according to their function in the MTF task, with only one child younger than 8 years doing so. Moreover, when verbally questioned, these children offered a function-based answer to explain their choices. One of six chimpanzees also successfully paired objects according to function. Children and at least one chimpanzee can thus spontaneously sort tools into functional categories based on observing a demonstrator. The success of a single chimpanzee in our task suggests that teleological reasoning might already have been present in our last common ancestor but also shows that human children more readily conceptualize tools in a spontaneous fashion.
Highlights
Www.nature.com/scientificreports related to the tools themselves remains poorly understood
Kelemen and Carey[29] suggest that children may start acquiring a causally rich explanatory structure represented by an intentional-historical design stance based on intended function as early as two years of age, as long as the perceptual information is consistent with a specific function, leading them to categorize artifacts on the basis of functional properties
While tool use cognition has been at the center of the debate regarding the uniqueness of the human mind[5,41], to date there is little discussion of the conceptual underpinnings of tool use from a comparative perspective[24,32]
Summary
Www.nature.com/scientificreports related to the tools themselves remains poorly understood. Chimpanzees were able to sort objects according to their nature (‘food’ or ‘tool’) and use the symbols to request particular tools to recover particular food items from one another These and subsequent studies (e.g.20,21) have been criticized as subjects’ performance could have resulted from training, rather than from spontaneous categorization[22]. Santos et al.[23] showed that cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus) and rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta), two species that do not use tools in the wild, used perceptual features (e.g. color) to separate objects into categories such as tools or foods None of these studies addressed the question whether non-human primates are able to categorize tools as tools, that is, as meaningful ontological entities[24] whose function is to act on the environment. Only the first outcome would yield strong results with respect to spontaneous categorization abilities for tools
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