The traditional view on the cerebellum is that it controls motor behavior. Although recent work has revealed that the cerebellum supports also nonmotor functions such as cognition and affect, only ...during the last 5 years it has become evident that the cerebellum also plays an important social role. This role is evident in social cognition based on interpreting goal-directed actions through the movements of individuals (social “mirroring”) which is very close to its original role in motor learning, as well as in social understanding of other individuals’ mental state, such as their intentions, beliefs, past behaviors, future aspirations, and personality traits (social “mentalizing”). Most of this mentalizing role is supported by the posterior cerebellum (e.g., Crus I and II). The most dominant hypothesis is that the cerebellum assists in learning and understanding social action sequences, and so facilitates social cognition by supporting optimal predictions about imminent or future social interaction and cooperation. This consensus paper brings together experts from different fields to discuss recent efforts in understanding the role of the cerebellum in social cognition, and the understanding of social behaviors and mental states by others, its effect on clinical impairments such as cerebellar ataxia and autism spectrum disorder, and how the cerebellum can become a potential target for noninvasive brain stimulation as a therapeutic intervention. We report on the most recent empirical findings and techniques for understanding and manipulating cerebellar circuits in humans. Cerebellar circuitry appears now as a key structure to elucidate social interactions.
The increasing demands of customers to use climate neutral products are leading to severe challenges for manufacturing companies in various industry sectors. The most significant issues lie in ...measuring and evaluating the resulting environmental impacts across the various lifecycle phases of a product. Especially for the tooling industry, it can be a decisive competitive factor, not only to measure and evaluate the environmental impact of the tool manufacturing processes, but also of the use phase of the manufactured tools. Therefore, this paper presents a concept for ecological assessment for tooling companies, taking the manufacturing phase and the use phase into account. It describes how tool manufacturers can evaluate their own processes based on material and energy inputs and outputs in order to link the environmental impacts to the manufactured product. In tool manufacturing, the digital twin is used as an essential medium for collecting ecological information and converting it into impact variables. The recorded production data from the manufacturing and use phase will be aggregated into different target dimensions: By using the target dimensions “Tool”, ”Tool component” and “Process” the evaluation concept can not only be used for a holistic report on environmental impacts of the manufactured products, but also be used to improve technology use and application from an ecological perspective. By adding the target dimension “Product” the use phase of the tool will be considered, in order to be able to visualize effects in which an ecologically intensive production can lead to reduction in environmental impact over the use phase. Furthermore, the target dimension “Company” is aggregating the derived data, which is necessary for the evaluation of the other target dimensions, to reporting types, such as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol or the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive.
Although other animals can make simple tools, the expanded and complex material culture of humans is unprecedented in the animal kingdom. Tool making is a slow and late-developing ability in humans, ...and preschool children find making tools to solve problems very challenging. This difficulty in tool making might be related to the lack of familiarity with the tools and may be overcome by children's long term perceptual-motor knowledge. Thus, in this study, the effect of tool familiarity on tool making was investigated with a task in which 5-to-6-year-old children (n = 75) were asked to remove a small bucket from a vertical tube. The results show that children are better at tool making if the tool and its relation to the task are familiar to them (e.g., soda straw). Moreover, we also replicated the finding that hierarchical complexity and tool making were significantly related. Results are discussed in light of the ideomotor approach.
•Familiarity with the tools affects 5- and 6-year old children’s tool making.•Children are better at tool-making if the tool-task relation is familiar.•Constructing hierarchical shapes and tool-making skills are related processes.•Results are in line with the ideomotor approach to action anticipation.
Social media research software has come to play increasingly important roles in processes of knowledge production. While epistemological, logistical, legal, and ethical concerns put the spotlight on ...the software tools researchers are relying on, little attention is paid to the role of the ‘toolmaker’ beyond a vague idea of the ‘power’ wielded by those who design, develop, and maintain these technical artifacts. This paper seeks to address this role, both conceptually and with attention to practical concerns, as a form of hybrid and relational authorship. We thereby shift the focus from tool to tool-making, from artifact to practice, in an attempt to produce a different kind of ‘unblackboxing’ of tools than the somewhat overused tropes of open source code or open data. Our contribution proceeds in three steps. We first address tools and tool-making from a theoretical perspective, suggesting that their epistemological orientation reaches more deeply into the networks of research practice than words like ‘bias’ admit and proposing to consider the specific kind of hybrid authorship that emerges in this context. Calling on our own experiences as toolmakers, we then reflect on a cluster of issues where this authorial function becomes particularly visible. Here, we examine how motivations and commitments orient what a piece of software does and how it does it and discuss tool-making from the perspectives of co-development, maintenance and care, and ethics by design. We conclude by arguing that the most pressing concerns for tool-making lie in institutional arrangements that are crucial for the life of research software.
This paper presents and justifies Gephisto, an experimental tool visualizing networks in one click. Gephisto’s design exemplifies how we can interfere with a user’s utilitarian goals, by giving them ...what they wish (an easy way to get a network map) but in disobedient ways (the produced map is different every time the tool is used) that encourage them to engage further with the tool’s methodological tenets. As an apparatus, Gephisto aims to incentivize untrained users to become more critical of their network mapping practices. As an intervention into the field of digital methods, it aims to show that tools that support critical thinking do not have to be hard to use and hostile to beginners. We criticize the idea that tools range from easy-to-use black boxes for unreflexive lazy-thinkers, to complex and demanding instruments for hard-thinking experts. We argue that learners need ease of use and critical thinking at the same time, and that it is possible to design tools that support both needs at once. We offer an alternative model where we acknowledge the active role of the user in deciding the tradeoff between learning to master the tool, and progressing toward their utilitarian goals. We argue that the design of the tool should not oppose the beginner’s need for assistance in decision making, but find other ways to incentivize critical thinking.
•Pipe cleaner play did not improve BaYaka and Bondongo children’s hook task success.•Children innovated novel uses for pipe cleaners outside the experimental context.•Prior relevant experience may ...improve children’s performance during innovation tasks.•Combining observations and experiments improves our understanding of tool innovation.
Tool innovation has played a crucial role in human adaptation. Yet, this capacity seems to arise late in development. Before 8 years of age, many children struggle to solve the hook task, a common measure of tool innovation that requires modification of a straight pipe cleaner into a hook to extract a prize. Whether these findings are generalizable beyond postindustrialized Western children remains unclear. In many small-scale subsistence societies, children engage in daily tool use and modification, experiences that theoretically could enhance innovative capabilities. Although two previous studies found no differences in innovative ability between children from Western and small-scale subsistence societies, these did not account for the latter’s inexperience with pipe cleaners. Thus, the current study investigated how familiarity with pipe cleaners affected hook task success in 132 Congolese BaYaka foragers (57 girls) and 59 Bondongo fisher–farmers (23 girls) aged 4–12 years. We contextualized these findings within children’s interview responses and naturalistic observations of how pipe cleaners were incorporated into daily activities. Counter to our expectation, prior exposure did not improve children’s performance during the hook task. Bondongo children innovated significantly more hooks than BaYaka children, possibly because they participate in hook-and-line fishing. Observations and interviews showed that children imagined and innovated novel uses for pipe cleaners outside the experimental context, including headbands, bracelets, and suspenders. We relate our findings to ongoing debates regarding systematic versus unsystematic tool innovation, the importance of prior experience for the ontogeny of tool innovation, and the external validity of experimental paradigms.
When humans and other animals make cultural innovations, they also change their environment, thereby imposing new selective pressures that can modify their biological traits. For example, there is ...evidence that dairy farming by humans favored alleles for adult lactose tolerance. Similarly, the invention of cooking possibly affected the evolution of jaw and tooth morphology. However, when it comes to cognitive traits and learning mechanisms, it is much more difficult to determine whether and how their evolution was affected by culture or by their use in cultural transmission. Here we argue that, excluding very recent cultural innovations, the assumption that culture shaped the evolution of cognition is both more parsimonious and more productive than assuming the opposite. In considering how culture shapes cognition, we suggest that a process-level model of cognitive evolution is necessary and offer such a model. The model employs relatively simple coevolving mechanisms of learning and data acquisition that jointly construct a complex network of a type previously shown to be capable of supporting a range of cognitive abilities. The evolution of cognition, and thus the effect of culture on cognitive evolution, is captured through small modifications of these coevolving learning and data-acquisition mechanisms, whose coordinated action is critical for building an effective network. We use the model to show how these mechanisms are likely to evolve in response to cultural phenomena, such as language and tool-making, which are associated with major changes in data patterns and with new computational and statistical challenges.
Human cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) is recognized as a powerful ecological and evolutionary force, but its origins are poorly understood. The long-standing view that CCE requires specialized ...social learning processes such as teaching has recently come under question, and cannot explain why such processes evolved in the first place. An alternative, but largely untested, hypothesis is that these processes gradually coevolved with an increasing reliance on complex tools. To address this, we used large-scale transmission chain experiments (624 participants), to examine the role of different learning processes in generating cumulative improvements in two tool types of differing complexity. Both tool types increased in efficacy across experimental generations, but teaching only provided an advantage for the more complex tools. Moreover, while the simple tools tended to converge on a common design, the more complex tools maintained a diversity of designs. These findings indicate that the emergence of cumulative culture is not strictly dependent on, but may generate selection for, teaching. As reliance on increasingly complex tools grew, so too would selection for teaching, facilitating the increasingly open-ended evolution of cultural artefacts.
Language plays a pivotal role in the evolution of human culture, yet the evolution of the capacity for language—uniquely within the hominin lineage—remains little understood. Bringing together ...insights from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, archaeology and behavioural ecology, we hypothesize that this singular occurrence was triggered by exaptation, or ‘hijacking’, of existing cognitive mechanisms related to sequential processing and motor execution. Observed coupling of the communication system with circuits related to complex action planning and control supports this proposition, but the prehistoric ecological contexts in which this coupling may have occurred and its adaptive value remain elusive. Evolutionary reasoning rules out most existing hypotheses regarding the ecological context of language evolution, which focus on ultimate explanations and ignore proximate mechanisms. Coupling of communication and motor systems, although possible in a short period on evolutionary timescales, required a multi-stepped adaptive process, involving multiple genes and gene networks. We suggest that the behavioural context that exerted the selective pressure to drive these sequential adaptations had to be one in which each of the systems undergoing coupling was independently necessary or highly beneficial, as well as frequent and recurring over evolutionary time. One such context could have been the teaching of tool production or tool use. In the present study, we propose the Cognitive Coupling hypothesis, which brings together these insights and outlines a unifying theory for the evolution of the capacity for language.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Bridging cultural gaps: interdisciplinary studies in human cultural evolution’.
•Offers a new framework for comparative biology and psychology studies that builds on neuroethological studies of action-oriented perception in relation to manual skills•Builds on the theory of ...“tooling” of Fragaszy and Mangalam (2018).•Detailed analysis of how birds construct their nests highlights key questions for analyzing construction.•Extends Gibson's ecological psychology of affordances to explores their possible titration against cognitive processes.•Contrasts the “how” of action details and the “what” of motor programs•Introduces the notation P }A}E to indicate that, when precondition P is satisfied, action A is likely to have effect E on the external world. The word “likely” indicates that effect E may not be achieved and that corrective action or replanning may be required.•Enriches this with conceptual analysis of several brain modeling efforts including opportunistic scheduling.•Extends action models to a framework for analysis of construction.•Assesses and critiques the notion of (multi-modal) “image” in the assemblage of actions in complex behaviors.•Contrasts percussive tooling by monkeys with the subtractive construction of Oldowan and Acheulean traditions of stone tool making.•Contrasts these with the additive construction of bird nests and hafted tools.•Briefly discusses birdsong before discussing the emergence of language.•Compares two hypotheses linking manual action via pantomime to communication as a foundation for the emergence of language: the technological pedagogy hypothesis and the mirror system hypothesis.•Argues that language, having evolved from manual skills, provides an open-ended means for devising innovations in tool use and construction.
The present paper provides an integrative theory of actions and motor programs for skill in tool use, construction, and language. We analyze preconditions for action as well as making their effects (postconditions) explicit, emphasizing the “how” of action details as well as the “what” of motor programs, aided by conceptual analysis of several brain modeling efforts. The theory is exemplified by analysis of the subtractive construction involved in percussive tooling by capuchin monkeys and Oldowan and Acheulean stone tool making by protohumans before turning to the additive construction of hafted tools. A complementary analysis focused on the construction of bird nests explores the notion of “image” and “stage” in construction. We offer a brief comparison with birdsong before arguing for a very different relation between communication and construction in humans. Pantomime lifts manipulation from practical to communicative action in protohumans, and we consider the role of pedagogy before offering hypotheses on the emergence of human language that suggest how language may have evolved from manual skills. We note that language provides an open-ended means for devising innovations in tool use and construction, but reiterate the importance of this framework for diverse future studies in ethology and comparative psychology.
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