Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent findings of activation of language networks in the brain during stone tool manufacture support hypotheses aboutthe co-evolution of language and technology. Our study replicates these findings and demonstrates that distinct toolmakingbehaviors and levels of expertise affect how reliably these networks are activated. Subjects, including expert toolmakers(n = 7) and untrained participants (n = 10), watched naturalistic videos of an expert toolmaker making three technologiesand imagined themselves performing the same actions as the toolmaker while being scanned. We performed event-relatedGLM analyses on our data, focusing on activation during observation and flaking. All technologies recruited networksinvolved in language production and comprehension, including IFG, vPMC, dPMC, SPL, IPL, and pMTG. Flaking en-gaged language networks more reliably than observation. Our study considers whether expertise is required for Oldowan,Acheulean, and Levallois comprehension by exploring the extent to which activation in language networks increases withtool complexity.