Chimpanzees spontaneously alter the location of their gestures to match the attentional orientation of others

Povinelli, Daniel J.; Theall, Laura; Reaux, James E.; Dunphy-Lelii, Sarah

doi:10.1006/anbe.2003.2195

Cited by 59 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…For example, Hostetter et al (2001) found that captive chimpanzees produced communicative gestures and facial expressions significantly more often when an experimenter was facing them than when not. Povinelli et al (2003) also found that chimpanzees alter the location of their gestures to match others' orientation-producing their gestures where others can see them. Finally, Liebal et al (2004) found that while non-human species of great ape (Pan, Gorilla and Pongo) do not use tactile or auditory signals to elicit the attention of a potential (human) donor of food before producing requestive gestures, they do move into the donor's line of sight, so that their gestures can be seen.…”

Section: Do Apes Produce Their Gestures With Gricean Second Clause Inmentioning

confidence: 91%

Meaning and ostension in great ape gestural communication

2015

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It is sometimes argued that while human gestures are produced ostensively and intentionally, great ape gestures are produced only intentionally. If true, this would make the psychological mechanisms underlying the different species' communication fundamentally different, and ascriptions of meaning to chimpanzee gestures would be inappropriate. While the existence of different underlying mechanisms cannot be ruled out, in fact claims about difference are driven less by empirical data than by contested assumptions about the nature of ostensive communication. On some accounts, there are no reasons to doubt that great ape gestural communication is ostensive. If these accounts are correct, attributions of meaning to chimpanzee gestures would be justified.

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Section: Do Apes Produce Their Gestures With Gricean Second Clause Inmentioning

confidence: 91%

Meaning and ostension in great ape gestural communication

2015

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“…Evidence for the former would be evidence that apes address their gestures differently to attentive and inattentive individuals, something for which there is already abundant evidence Povinelli et al 2003). Evidence for the latter might be provided by different patterns of attention to individuals who are and are not addressing them.…”

Section: Richard Moorementioning

confidence: 99%

Nonhuman Primate Communication, Pragmatics, and the Origins of Language

Scott‐Phillips¹

2015

Current Anthropology

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Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Nonhuman Primate Communication, Pragmatics, and the Origins of Language by Thomas C. Scott-PhillipsComparisons with the cognition and communication of other species have long informed discussions of the origins and evolution of human communication and language. This research has often focused on similarities and differences with the linguistic code, but more recently there has been an increased focus on the social-cognitive foundations of linguistic communication. However, exactly what these comparisons tell us is not clear because the theoretical concepts used in the animal communication literature are different from those used in the corresponding literature on human communication, specifically those used in linguistic pragmatics. In this article, I bridge the gap between these two areas and in doing so specify exactly what great ape communication tells us about the origins of human communication and language. I conclude that great ape communication probably does not share the same socialcognitive foundations as linguistic communication but that it probably does involve the use of metacognitive abilities that, once they evolved to a more sophisticated degree, were exapted for use in what is an evolutionarily novel form of communication: human ostensive communication. This in turn laid the foundations for the emergence of linguistic communication. More generally, I highlight the often-neglected importance of pragmatics for the study of language origins.The origin of human communication and language is a topic that has exercised many generations of scholars (Stam 1976). Since Darwin, an important source of data has been comparisons between linguistic communication and the communication systems of other species (Fitch 2010). A great deal of research has thus focused on the extent to which nonhuman primates' natural communication systems have the same or similar properties as human languages (e.g., Arnold and Zuberbühler 2006;Seyfarth, Cheney, and Marler 1980a). More recently, it has been argued that despite these similarities, many forms of great ape communication are probably based on different cognitive mechanisms from human language, and hence that the evolutionary conclusions we can draw from comparisons with the surface form of these systems (e.g., their "syntax," "semantics," etc.) are either unclear or limited (Deacon 1997;Rendall, Owren, and Ryan 2009;Tomasello 2008;Wheeler and Fischer 2012). Consequently, the focus of much current research on great ape communication i...

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“…(for a recent example see Povinelli, Theall, Reaux and Dunphy-Lelii, 2003). In no way has their performance on our tasks, or their spontaneous behavior, indicated that they deviate from the patterns of behavior observed in wild chimpanzees or in other captive settings.…”

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confidence: 54%

“…Second, our chimpanzees have led the way in demonstrating the complexities of their species' behavior including the ability to follow human gaze, engage in mirror-guided self exploratory behaviors, joint attention, tool use, use social cues to determine object choice, etc. (for a recent example see Povinelli, Theall, Reaux and Dunphy-Lelii, 2003). In no way has their performance on our tasks, or their spontaneous behavior, indicated that they deviate from the patterns of behavior observed in wild chimpanzees or in other captive settings.…”

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confidence: 61%

We Don’t Need a Microscope to Explore the Chimpanzee's Mind

Povinelli¹,

Vonk²

2004

Mind & Language

224

108

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The question of whether chimpanzees, like humans, reason about unobservable mental states remains highly controversial. On one account, chimpanzees are seen as possessing a psychological system for social cognition that represents and reasons about behaviors alone. A competing account allows that the chimpanzee's social cognition system additionally construes the behaviors it represents in terms of mental states. Because the range of behaviors that each of the two systems can generate is not currently known, and because the latter system depends upon the former, determining the presence of this latter system in chimpanzees is a far more difficult task than has been assumed. We call for recognition of this problem, and a shift from experimental paradigms that cannot resolve this question, to ones that might allow researchers to intelligently determine when it is necessary to postulate the presence of a system which reasons about both behavior and mental states.

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Chimpanzees spontaneously alter the location of their gestures to match the attentional orientation of others

Cited by 59 publications

References 40 publications

Meaning and ostension in great ape gestural communication

Meaning and ostension in great ape gestural communication

Nonhuman Primate Communication, Pragmatics, and the Origins of Language

We Don’t Need a Microscope to Explore the Chimpanzee's Mind

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