Human beings are naturally creative tool users. When we need to drive in a nail but don’t have a hammer, we easily realize that we can use a heavy, flat object like a rock in its place. When our table is shaky, we quickly find that we can put a stack of paper under the table leg to stabilize it. But while these actions seem so natural to us, they are believed to be a hallmark of great intelligence—only a few other species use objects in novel ways to solve their problems, and none can do so as flexibly as people. What provides us with these powerful capabilities for using objects in this way?
In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describing work conducted at MIT’s Center for Brains, Minds and Machines, researchers Kelsey Allen, Kevin Smith, and Joshua Tenenbaum study the cognitive components that underlie this sort of improvised tool use. They designed a novel task, the Virtual Tools game, that taps into tool-use abilities: People must select one object from a set of “tools” that they can place in a two-dimensional, computerized scene to accomplish a goal, such as getting a ball into a certain container. Solving the puzzles in this game requires reasoning about a number of physical principles, including launching, blocking, or supporting objects.
Read more of the original article from MedicalXpress
