Published on January 8, 2019 | Updated on January 29, 2019

CORTEX conference by François Osiurak

January 25th, 2018

On the neurocognitive origins of human tool use: Toward a reasoning-based approach.

Tool use is a defining feature of human species. So, the issue of the underlying neurocognitive bases should be intensively explored. Yet, this issue has received very little interest, mainly because of the profound belief that tool use is based on manipulation knowledge, as if tool use did not require any reasoning skills. In this talk, I will discuss the main recent advances in neuropsychology and cognitive neurosciences that have contributed to revise the idea that manipulation is central to tool use. This will lead me to present a new theoretical model suggesting that specific reasoning skills are involved in tool use.