ArticlePsychological review2016
Tool use and affordance: Manipulation-based versus reasoning-based approaches.
Article in Psychological review, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 64 papers.
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Who cites it
64 citing papers in PubMed.
- Dissociation between physical reasoning and tool use in individuals with left hemisphere brain damage.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2026Article
- The flexible, the stereotyped and the in-between: putting together the combinatory tool use origins hypothesis.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Novel tool use does not depend on mechanical reasoning: evidence from apraxia.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Organization of affordance processing in perception-action systems.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- When affordances are not universal: The negative compatibility effect is modulated by task type and spatial association.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Article
- Dissociation between physical reasoning and tool use in individuals with left hemisphere brain damage.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Embodied Cognition of Manipulative Actions: Subliminal Grasping Semantics Enhance Using-Action Recognition.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Revisiting tool use and distance perception: twenty years later.Psychological research · 2025Review
- Object-directed action representations are componentially built in parietal cortex.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Exploring the cognitive underpinnings of early hominin stone tool use through an experimental EEG approach.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The "What" and "How" of Pantomime Actions.Vision (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Why motor imagery is not really motoric: towards a re-conceptualization in terms of effect-based action control.Psychological research · 2024Review
- Lifelong learning of cognitive styles for physical problem-solving: The effect of embodied experience.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Article
- Forward effects from action observation: the role of attentional focus.Psychological research · 2024Article
- On the functional brain networks involved in tool-related action understanding.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Manipulable objects can potentiate pointing and unusual grasping besides habitual grasping behaviors.Cognitive processing · 2023Article
- The elicitation of affordance depends on conceptual attributes: evidence from a virtual reality study.Experimental brain research · 2023Article
- Communicative capital: a key resource for human-machine shared agency and collaborative capacity.Neural computing & applications · 2023Review
- Tool mastering today - an interdisciplinary perspective.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Review
- The role of the anterior temporal cortex in action: evidence from fMRI multivariate searchlight analysis during real object grasping.Scientific reports · 2022Article
4 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Tool use is a defining feature of human species. Therefore, a fundamental issue is to understand the cognitive bases of human tool use. Given that people cannot use tools without manipulating them, proponents of the manipulation-based approach have argued that tool use might be supported by the simulation of past sensorimotor experiences, also sometimes called affordances. However, in the meanwhile, evidence has been accumulated demonstrating the critical role of mechanical knowledge in tool use (i.e., the reasoning-based approach). The major goal of the present article is to examine the validity of the assumptions derived from the manipulation-based versus the reasoning-based approach. To do so, we identified 3 key issues on which the 2 approaches differ, namely, (a) the reference frame issue, (b) the intention issue, and (c) the action domain issue. These different issues will be addressed in light of studies in experimental psychology and neuropsychology that have provided valuable contributions to the topic (i.e., tool-use interaction, orientation effect, object-size effect, utilization behavior and anarchic hand, tool use and perception, apraxia of tool use, transport vs. use actions). To anticipate our conclusions, the reasoning-based approach seems to be promising for understanding the current literature, even if it is not fully satisfactory because of a certain number of findings easier to interpret with regard to the manipulation-based approach. A new avenue for future research might be to develop a framework accommodating both approaches, thereby shedding a new light on the cognitive bases of human tool use and affordances. (PsycINFO Database Record
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