Young children spontaneously invent wild great apes' tool-use behaviours.
Young children spontaneously invent wild great apes' tool-use behaviours.
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DOI：
10.1098/rspb.2015.2402
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发表时间：
2016-02-24
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Tennie C
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Reindl E;Beck SR;Apperly IA;Tennie C
人造工具的多样性和复杂性在动物界是独一无二的。调查人类使用工具的特殊原因的研究集中在社会学习的作用上：非人类类人猿主要通过个人（再）发明获得工具使用行为，而现代人类则通过模仿和教学来积累创新。然而，对于人类在没有文化知识的情况下可以单独发明的工具使用行为，我们知之甚少。我们以类人猿的工具使用行为为基础，向2至3.5岁的儿童展示了12项解决问题的任务。在11个任务中观察到自发使用工具。此外，在野生类人猿身上更频繁出现的任务，也更频繁地由人类的孩子来解决。我们的研究结果表明，人类儿童和类人猿在自发使用工具的能力上有很大的相似性，这表明类人猿在使用工具的基础上的身体认知有很大的重叠。这表明，人类既不是天生就具有特殊的身体认知技能，也不是由于人类在工具使用领域长期依赖社会学习而导致这些技能退化。
The variety and complexity of human-made tools are unique in the animal kingdom. Research investigating why human tool use is special has focused on the role of social learning: while non-human great apes acquire tool-use behaviours mostly by individual (re-)inventions, modern humans use imitation and teaching to accumulate innovations over time. However, little is known about tool-use behaviours that humans can invent individually, i.e. without cultural knowledge. We presented 2- to 3.5-year-old children with 12 problem-solving tasks based on tool-use behaviours shown by great apes. Spontaneous tool use was observed in 11 tasks. Additionally, tasks which occurred more frequently in wild great apes were also solved more frequently by human children. Our results demonstrate great similarity in the spontaneous tool-use abilities of human children and great apes, indicating that the physical cognition underlying tool use shows large overlaps across the great ape species. This suggests that humans are neither born with special physical cognition skills, nor that these skills have degraded due to our species’ long reliance of social learning in the tool-use domain.