ArticlePsychological research2021
Hazardous tools: the emergence of reasoning in human tool use.
Article in Psychological research, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Causal reasoning guides visual exploration.Experimental brain research · 2026Article
- Deficits in reaching movements under visual interference as a novel diagnostic marker for mild cognitive impairment.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- On the functional brain networks involved in tool-related action understanding.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Eating Russula mushrooms is a matter of semantic knowledge. Comment on "The elicitation of affordance depends on conceptual attributes: evidence from a virtual reality study" by Lai et al. (2023).Experimental brain research · 2023Article
- The Area Prostriata may play a role in technical reasoning.Behavioral and brain functions : BBF · 2022Article
- Relationship between Tactile Sensation, Motor Activity, and Differential Brain Activity in Young Individuals.Brain sciences · 2022Article
- The cortical thickness of the area PF of the left inferior parietal cortex mediates technical-reasoning skills.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Bimanual motor skill learning after stroke: Combining robotics and anodal tDCS over the undamaged hemisphere: An exploratory study.Frontiers in neurology · 2022Article
- Modulation of Working Memory and Resting-State fMRI by tDCS of the Right Frontoparietal Network.Neural plasticity · 2021Article
- When the Action to Be Performed at the Stage of Retrieval Enacts Memory of Action Verbs.Experimental psychology · 2021Article
- Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humans are unique in the way they understand the causal relationships between the use of tools and achieving a goal. The idea at the core of the present research is that tool use can be considered as an instance of problem-solving situations supported by technical reasoning. In an eye-tracking study, we investigated the fixation patterns of participants (N = 32) looking at 3D images of thematically consistent (e.g., nail-steel hammer) and thematically inconsistent (e.g., scarf-steel hammer) object-tool pairs that could be either "hazardous" (accidentally electrified) or not. Results showed that under thematically consistent conditions, participants focused on the tool's manipulation area (e.g., the handle of a steel hammer). However, when electrified tools were present or when the visual scene was not action-prompting, regardless of the presence of electricity, the tools' functional/identity areas (e.g., the head of a steel hammer) were fixated longer than the tools' manipulation areas. These results support an integrated and reasoning-based approach to human tool use and document, for the first time, the crucial role of mechanical/semantic knowledge in tool visual exploration.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.