Tool Use and Causal Cognition

About this book

What cognitive abilities underpin the use of tools, and how are tools and their properties represented or understood by tool-users? Does the study of tool use provide us with a unique or distinctive source of information about the causal cognition of tool-users?

Tool use is a topic of major interest to all those interested in animal cognition, because it implies that the animal has knowledge of the relationship between objects and their effects. There are countless examples of animals developing tools to achieve some goal-chimps sharpening sticks to use as spears, bonobos using sticks to fish for termites, and New Caledonian crows developing complex tools to extracts insects from logs. Studies of tool use have been used to examine an exceptionally wide range of aspects of cognition, such as planning, problem-solving and insight, naive physics, social relationship between action and perception.

A key debate in recent research on animal cognition concerns the level of cognitive sophistication that is implied by animal tool use, and developmental psychologists have been addressing related questions regarding the processes through which children acquire the ability to use tools. In neuropsychology, patterns of impairments in tool use due to brain damage, and studies of neural changes associated with tool use, have also led to debates about the different types of cognitive abilities that might underpin tool use, and about how tool use may change the way space or the body is represented.

Tool Use and Causal Cognition provides a new interdisciplinary perspective on these issues with contributions from leading psychologists studying tool use and philosophers providing new analyses of the nature of causal understanding. A ground-breaking volume which covers several disciplines, this volume will be of interest to psychologists, including animal researchers and developmental psychologists as well as philosophers, and neuroscientists.

Contents

1. Teresa McCormack, Christoph Hoerl, & Stephen Butterfill: Tool Use and Causal Cognition: An Introduction
2. Jim Woodward: A Philosopher Looks at Tool Use and Causal Understanding
3. Melissa L. Greif & Amy Needham: The Development of Tool Use Early in Life
4. Daniel Povinelli & Derek C. Penn: Through a Floppy Tool Darkly: Toward a Conceptual Overthrow of Animal Alchemy
5. Amanda Seed, Daniel Hanus, & Josep Call: Causal Knowledge in Corvids, Primates and Children: More Than Meets the Eye?
6. Brian J. Edwards, Benjamin M. Rottman, & Laurie R. Santos: The Evolutionary Origins of Causal Cognition: Learning and Using Causal Structures
7. Teresa McCormack & Christoph Hoerl: Tool Use, Planning, and Future Thinking in Children and Animals
8. Christopher Peacocke: Representing Causality
9. John Campbell: Why Do Language and Tool Use Both Count as Manifestations of Intelligence?
10. Georg Goldenberg: Effects of brain damage on human tool use
11. Lucilla Cardinali, Claudio Brozzoli, Francesca Frassinetti, Alice C. Roy, Alessandro Farnè: Human tool-use: a causal role in plasticity of bodily and spatial representations
12. Charles Spence: Tool-use and the representation of peripersonal space in humans

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Biography

Teresa McCormack is Professor of Developmental Psychology at the School of Psychology, Queen's University Belfast. She was co-director of the AHRC-funded project on Causal Understanding based at the University of Warwick. Her research primarily addresses issues concerning children's temporal and causal cognition. She has published two co-edited interdisciplinary books: Time and Memory: Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychology (OUP, 2001), with C. Hoerl, and Joint Attention and Communication (OUP, 2005), with N. Eilan, C. Hoerl, and J. Roessler. A further volume entitled Understanding Counterfactuals, Understanding Causation, co-edited with C. Hoerl and S. Beck is forthcoming with OUP.

Christoph Hoerl is Associate Professor (Reader) in Philosophy at the University of Warwick. Between 2004 and 2008, he was co-director (with Teresa McCormack and Johannes Roessler) of the interdisciplinary AHRC Research Project 'Causal Understanding: Empirical and Theoretical Foundations for a New Approach'. With Teresa McCormack and Sarah Beck, he is co-editor of Understanding Counterfactuals, Understanding Causation (OUP, forthcoming).

Stephen Butterfill is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Warwick. His research focuses on philosophical issues in developmental psychology.


Contributors:
- Dr. Josep Call, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany
- Professor John Campbell, Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor of Philosophy University of California at Berkeley, USA
- Lucilla Cardinali, Espace et Action, INSERM, France
- Brian J. Edwards, Yale University, Department of Psychology, USA
- Dr. Alessandro Farne, Espace et Action, INSERM, France
- Dr. Georg Goldenberg, Neuropsychological Department , Klinikum Bogenhausen, and Neurological Department, Technical University Munich, Germany
- Professor Jeffrey, Lockman Tulane University, USA
- Professor Amy Needham, Department of Psychology & Human Development, Vanderbilt University, USA
- Professor Christopher Peacocke, Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, USA and also Wollheim Professor of Philosophy at University College London, UK
- Derek C. Penn, UCLA/University of Louisiana, USA
- Professor Daniel Povinelli, Cognitive Evolution Center, University of Louisiana, USA
- Benjamin M. Rottman, Yale University, Department of Psychology, USA
- Professor Laurie Santos, Department of Psychology Yale University, USA
- Amanda Seed, School of Psychology University of St Andrews, UK
- Professor Charles Spence, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, UK
- Professor James Woodward, J.O. and Juliette Koepfli Professor of the Humanities California Institute of Technology Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, USA