New Insights into the Development of Human Tool Use

If tool use requires higher-level cognitive abilities, how is it that many animals show the capacity to use tools? New research on the development of human tool use offers a way to resolve this paradox. The research suggests that there is a developmental synergy between affordance detection and motor learning: As juveniles continually explore affordances entailed by object-surface combinations in real time, they tune the actions that will be incorporated into tool use over developmental time. We illustrate these ideas with research on how object banging in infancy serves as the motor substrate for later developing percussive tool use. Collectively, the new research suggests that basic types of tool use in young humans and animals are rooted not in higher-order cognitive abilities, but shared principles of sensorimotor learning.