3 Chimpanzees plan their tool use

To a cognitive psychologist, chimpanzee tool use is exciting because of the opportunity it brings to examine how apes deal with a range of challenging situations that in humans would invoke planning. By planning it is meant a special kind of problem solving in which an appropriate course of action for the immediate or distant future is worked out by means of mental computation with brain representations of past or present situations (Miller et al., 1960). These include: a working representation of the current situation that presents a problem; episodic memories of specific past instances and events; and semantic knowledge about how things work or how people behave. Because a tool is not itself a goal-object, but has meaning and functionality only in regard to achieving a goal, problem solving with tools often makes more of the planning process “visible” than is normally the case (Seed & Byrne, 2010). Because a tool often must be selected to meet specific criteria in order to work, or – more telling still – may have to be made from specific raw materials in a particular way, getting an appropriate tool becomes an extra stage in the planning process. Thus, to approach a cognitive understanding of animal planning, studying tool use is by no means the only approach, but it is certainly a good one. Historically, however, understanding cognition has not been the major driving force in the study of tool use in great apes in primatology: that stemmed instead from anthropology, a subject with a very different agenda. To oversimplify, anthropology’s interest in ape tool use has been predicated on one version of the “silver bullet” theory of human origins – specifically, that using a tool provided the magic ingredient that converted an ancient ape to a person. “Man the tool maker,” a phrase attributed to Benjamin Franklin, sums it up – and famously, when Jane Goodall told Louis Leakey of her findings on chimpanzee tool manufacture, his first thought was for the re-definition that it would inevitably prompt some people to suggest – to stop chimpanzees