Confounding use of tools in physical tasks.

Citation

Martin-Ordas G (2017) Confounding use of tools in physical tasks.. In: Shackelford T & Weekes-Shackelford V (eds.) Cham, Switzerland: Springer. https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3178-1#chapter-info

Abstract
Tool use is a widespread behavior among human and nonhuman animals (see Shumaker et al. 2011 for a review) and understanding which cognitive mechanisms underlie this remarkable behavior has been the subject of an important amount research in the past decades (e.g., Sanz et al. 2013 for a review). Tool-use tasks that require subjects to overcome obstacles to get a reward have been important paradigms devoted to investigate causal knowledge in primates and birds (e.g., Call 2013). In this context, trap tasks – particularly, trap tube tasks – have been used extensively in recent years. Generally these tasks involve presenting subjects with a stick, a clear tube with a trap on its bottom part and a reward placed inside the tube next to the trap and outside of the subject’s direct reach. Subjects have to use the stick to get the reward out of the tube while avoiding the trap in which the reward may fall (e.g., Visalberghi and Limongelli 1994).

Keywords
Trap-tube task; Cross-modality Matching; Heuristic Learning; Extra Cognitive Load; Visalberghi

People

Dr Gema Martin-Ordas

Senior Lecturer, Psychology