Human children and wild great apes share their tool use cognition

Posted on 24 Feb 2016

Young children will spontaneously invent tool behaviours to solve novel problems, without the help of adults, much as non-human great apes have been observed to do. The findings, from the University of Birmingham, are contrary to the popular belief that basic tool use in humans requires social learning.

Lev Vygotsky, one of psychology’s most influential representatives, claimed that humans only learn how to use tools by learning from others, including parents, and that children’s spontaneous tool use is “practically zero”. However, this study has proven said theory wrong.

The findings, publishing in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, are the first to investigate children’s tool-use abilities with great ape tasks.

The researchers based the tasks on tool behaviours observed in wild chimpanzees and orangutans, and mirrored them for 50 children aged between 2.5-3-years-old.

The findings also suggest that the cognitive abilities underlying these tool behaviours are shared by both humans and their closest living relatives.

The team found that in 11 of the 12 tasks children spontaneously invented the correct tool behaviour. They also found that those behaviours which occur frequently in wild great apes were also invented more frequently by the children, which indicates a large overlap in the physical cognition abilities of humans and great apes.

Eva Reindl, PhD student at the University of Birmingham’s School of Psychology, said, “We chose great ape tasks for three reasons: Firstly, they are unfamiliar to children. This ensures that children will have to invent the correct behaviour instead of using socially acquired, previous knowledge. Second, they are ecologically relevant and third, they allow us to make species comparisons with regard to the cognitive abilities involved.”

In one of the twelve tasks, children needed to use a stick as a lever to retrieve pom poms from a small box. Similarly, great apes use twigs to remove kernels from nuts or seeds from stingy fruits. The tasks could only be solved by using a tool, but children were not told that.

Dr Claudio Tennie, Birmingham Fellow, explained, “The idea was to provide children with the raw material necessary to solve the task. We told children the goal of the task, for example to get the pom poms out of the box, but we never mentioned using the tool to them. We would then investigate whether children spontaneously came up with the correct tool behaviour on their own.”

Miss Reindl noted, “While it is true that more sophisticated forms of human tool use indeed require social learning, we have identified a range of basic tool behaviours which seem not to. Using great ape tasks, we could show that these roots of human tool culture are shared by great apes, including humans, and potentially also their last common ancestor.”

In the future, the researchers will try to extend their findings by presenting children and great apes with tool tasks that are completely novel to any of these species, e.g. tasks based on tool behaviours observed in non-primate animals but not shown spontaneously by children or great apes.

Pathway to better metabolism discovered in fat cells

Control over obesity and diabetes may be one step closer thanks to a Hiroshima University study in fat tissue.

The research team of Professor Kazunori Imaizumi, PhD, at Hiroshima University has mapped the activation pathway for a protein responsible for burning excess energy in the body.

If the pathway can be confirmed in living animal studies, control of this pathway may lead to treatments for obesity and related metabolic diseases. Researchers studied mouse fat cells growing in a dish using a combination of chemical treatments and protein measurements.

Part of the pathway involves a protein found only in brown fat cells. Fat cells are classified as either brown or white. White fat accumulates during unhealthy weight gain, but some brown fat is essential for a healthy metabolism.

This protein in brown fat cells, called UCP1, is involved in the process of how warm-blooded animals maintain a stable internal body temperature. This process, called thermogenesis, involves burning excess energy inside the body rather than storing it as fat. More UCP1 means a higher metabolism and less weight gain.

Prof. Imaizumi's team investigated two proteins called IRE1alpha and XBP1 for their relationship to UCP1. When these proteins are active, they can increase the amount of UCP1 inside the cell. Researchers also identified other molecules that act even earlier in the control pathway.

These results provide strong evidence that somewhere within this cellular signaling cascade is the possibility for precision control of fat cells' metabolic process using UCP1.

Current treatments for metabolic diseases like Type 2 Diabetes and obesity rely on reducing the amount of energy entering the cells. These treatments focus on reducing white fat cells, which store excess calories. Treatments targeting UCP1 would be completely novel by increasing the amount of energy leaving the body. This would require the seemingly counter-intuitive method of increasing the number of the other type of fat cells, brown fat cells, like those used in Prof. Imaizumi's work.

"Brown fat cells dissipate excess energy in the form of heat. Therefore, having a large number of brown fat cells leads to an anti-obesity effect," said Rie Asada, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Imaizumi's lab.

Prof. Imaizumi's research team is currently planning experiments to develop a more detailed understanding of the cellular pathways that lead to UCP1's metabolic actions within brown fat cells.

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided byHiroshima University. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

 

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