From a cognitive point of view, humans and animals have modules that they rely on for certain tasks. For Human Neuropsych assessment, the combination of the function of these modules gives you a score for general intelligence, with each module contributing toward the whole. Having a removed or changed “module” for one reason or another will sometimes cause localized task failures (e.g., neurodegenerative disease or brain injury) or approach to tasks that is atypical (e.g., atypical brain development). Maybe we can think of specific cognitive functions as being API calls to a modules in this “tool use” paradigm? This is likely not an original thought, and if anyone has references or has heard of this idea, please let me know!