Tool Use and Problem Solving in Animals

Keyword(s):  

2009 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 507-513 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Kuba ◽  
Ruth A. Byrne ◽  
Gordon M. Burghardt
Keyword(s):  
Tool Use ◽  


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lakshmi Nair ◽  
Sonia Chernova

Robots in the real world should be able to adapt to unforeseen circumstances. Particularly in the context of tool use, robots may not have access to the tools they need for completing a task. In this paper, we focus on the problem of tool construction in the context of task planning. We seek to enable robots to construct replacements for missing tools using available objects, in order to complete the given task. We introduce the Feature Guided Search (FGS) algorithm that enables the application of existing heuristic search approaches in the context of task planning, to perform tool construction efficiently. FGS accounts for physical attributes of objects (e.g., shape, material) during the search for a valid task plan. Our results demonstrate that FGS significantly reduces the search effort over standard heuristic search approaches by ≈93% for tool construction.



1998 ◽  
Vol 36 (7) ◽  
pp. 581-589 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georg Goldenberg ◽  
Sonja Hagmann


Author(s):  
Jay Schulkin

Continues the thread of our anchoring to objects and others in the organization of action and in sport in particular; social organization, human development, pedagogy, and tool use. I start with the visual system, so central to human evolution and our practice of most sports. I will then continue with problem solving and sport, throwing, swimming and rowing; biogical spreading through sports and sports impacting physical and mental capabilities. Human evolutionary history shows that throwing is a feature of our species and that to throw well was to survive. The capacity to store energy and release it with control, rapidity, and flexibility probably emerged with Homo erectus about 2 million years ago, along with greater flexibility of the torso; the infusion of energy vital for hunting and running emerged with shoulder flexibility and control over the elbow and wrist.



Author(s):  
Benjamin B. Beck ◽  
Kristina Walkup ◽  
Robert Shumaker
Keyword(s):  


2021 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 689-716
Author(s):  
Kevin Laland ◽  
Amanda Seed

Humanity has regarded itself as intellectually superior to other species for millennia, yet human cognitive uniqueness remains poorly understood. Here, we evaluate candidate traits plausibly underlying our distinctive cognition (including mental time travel, tool use, problem solving, social cognition, and communication) as well as domain generality, and we consider how human cognitive uniqueness may have evolved. We conclude that there are no traits present in humans and absent in other animals that in isolation explain our species’ superior cognitive performance; rather, there are many cognitive domains in which humans possess unusually potent capabilities compared to those found in other species. Humans are flexible cognitive all-rounders, whose proficiency arises through interactions and reinforcement between cognitive domains at multiple scales.



2012 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 218-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael A. Arbib

AbstractWe examine tool use in relation to the capacity of animals for construction, contrasting tools and nests; place human tool use in a more general problem-solving context, revisiting the body schema in the process; and relate the evolution of language and of tool use.



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