Commentary: Effects of dividing attention on memory for declarative and procedural aspects of tool use

摘要

When we use a physical tool, such as a knife or a hammer, we have to manipulate it in order to perform the intended mechanical action. For more than a century, scientists have placed a great emphasis on the manipulative/gestural aspect, leading them to posit that human tool use is supported by the ability to store sensorimotor knowledge about how to manipulate tools, also called manipulation knowledge (Geschwind, 1975; Heilman et al., 1982; Rothi et al., 1991; Buxbaum, 2001; Binkofski and Buxbaum, 2013; Bach et al., 2014; van Elk et al., 2014). The manipulation-based approach has been challenged in recent years. Particularly, evidence from left brain-damaged patients has indicated a strong relationship between familiar tool use (using a hammer with a nail) and mechanical problem solving (using a novel tool to extract a target out from a box; e.g., Heilman et al., 1997; Goldenberg and Hagmann, 1998; Hartmann et al., 2005; Goldenberg and Spatt, 2009; Osiurak et al., 2009, 2013; Jarry et al., 2013, 2015; for reviews, Baumard et al., 2014; Osiurak and Badets, 2016). Manipulation knowledge cannot be helpful to solve mechanical problem-solving tasks, because the tools are novel and, therefore, are not associated with any specific gesture. Moreover, the difficulty of the task mainly lies in the selection of the appropriate tools to perform the intended mechanical actions.