ABSTRACT
In our daily lives, we encounter many tools that make our lives easier and that are essential; one cannot eat a hot soup without a spoon. However, many nonhuman animals also use tools. In this chapter, I first review tool use in nonhuman animals in the wild and in experimental settings, including the latest studies from the point of view of comparative cognition research; and then suggest how a methodology with techniques used mainly in comparative cognition research could be applied to physiological psychology. I introduce tool use tasks in rats to investigate the neural mechanism of tool use in animals, potentially to develop animal models of tool use disorder observed in human patients with ideational apraxia.
