Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

Just a tool after all? No evidence for tool-use effects on the body representation across virtual and real environments

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https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/8g84mv28k

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  • While human tool-use proficiency helped define our history, the cognitive and perceptual mechanics of how humans use tools are not fully understood. This question is of great value to the design of hand-held tools and prosthetics. A prominent theory, tool embodiment, suggests that tool use is facilitated by a flexible internal body model that can incorporate tool characteristics and would predict, for instance, that using a racket would cause a tennis player to perceive their arm as longer. Across three pre-registered studies in real and virtual environments, this dissertation probed the hypothesis that tool-use extends the body representation. Participants engaged in reaching and body landmark localization tasks before and after a tool-use task, where a 40cm grabber tool was used to lift and replace an object. The expectation was that, following tool-use, their reaching movements would exhibit smaller kinematic peaks later in the movement and that their landmark localizations would become biased to be more distant, implying a longer arm representation. Despite similarities to past studies of tool embodiment, I observed substantial evidence against the representational extension hypothesis in the form of Bayes Factors which favored the null hypothesis. These findings are not likely due to potential differences between real and virtual environments, as the final study failed to replicate tool-use effects in a real environment. These results conflict with the extension hypothesis, implying that the field’s current methods of identifying tool embodiment are not valid operationalizations of representational change. The work presented in this dissertation highlights limitations in our understanding of human tool-use. Further, the entirety of the methodology and analysis has been made publicly available to assist in exploring these concepts.
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  • This research was supported by a Psi Chi Graduate Student Research Grant.
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