Indexical and referential pointing in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).

Leavens, David A.; Hopkins, William D.; Bard, Kim A.

doi:10.1037/0735-7036.110.4.346

Cited by 205 publications

(236 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Leavens and colleagues have documented chimpanzees pointing intentionally to request food from an experimenter (Leavens and Hopkins 1998;Leavens et al 1996Leavens et al , 2004. Menzel (1999) described the chimpanzee Panzee pointing to a variety of food locations to inform a naive human after delays of several hours.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) point to inform a human about the location of a tool

et al. 2008

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Although pointing is not part of great apes' natural gestural repertoire, they can learn to point to food, in order to request it. To assess the Xexibility with which they can use this gesture, one can vary the potential referent of the point. In two previous studies, three orangutans (two of them human-reared) have shown the ability to point to the location of a tool which a human experimenter needed in order to give them food. Here, we tested six orangutans and Wve bonobos using a set-up in which our subjects had to guide a human experimenter to the hiding place of a fork which was needed in order to retrieve a piece of food for the subject out of a vertical tube. We further examined the potential role of a competitive/deceptive context by varying the identity of the person responsible for hiding the tool. In addition, we implemented three diVerent control conditions in which an object was hidden but it was not necessary to indicate its location to get the food. We found that the majority of subjects spontaneously guided the experimenter to the hiding place of the fork by pointing to it when it was necessary and they did so signiWcantly less in control conditions. We did not Wnd an eVect of the person hiding the fork. Our results show that mother-reared orangutans and bonobos are able to point to inform a human about the location of an object that the human needs to procure food for the subject and that they can take into account whether it is relevant or not to do so.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) point to inform a human about the location of a tool

et al. 2008

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“…When humans display these behaviours towards captive apes, captive apes acquire a different set of communicative skills specifically shaped for interactions with humans compared to their wild conspecifics. For instance, captive apes frequently point to distal objects, a behaviour which is currently thought to be absent in the wild conspecifics (Leavens et al, 1996, De Waal, 2001, Leavens et al, 2009). …”

Section: Aims Of the Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Liebal et al, 2004a, Leavens et al, 1996, Leavens and Hopkins, 1998, Tomasello et al, 1984, Tomasello et al, 1985, Tomasello and Frost, 1989. Gestural communication in freeranging chimpanzees has not been studied systematically and existing studies are primarily descriptive and based upon opportunistically sampled data on gestural repertoire.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Usage and comprehension of manual gestures in wild chimpanzees

2012

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An important element in understanding the evolutionary origin of human language is to explore homologous traits in cognition and communication between primates and humans (Burling, 1993, Hewes, 1973. One proposed modality of language evolution is that of gestural communication, defined as communicative movements of hands without using or touching objects (de Waal, 2003). While homologies between primate calls and language have been relatively well explored, we still have a limited understanding of how cognitive abilities may have shaped the characteristics of primate gestures (Corballis, 2003). In this Ph.D. research, I investigated the cognitive skills underlying gestural communication in both wild and language trained chimpanzees, with a special focus on the repertoire and the intentionality of production and comprehension. The study of cognitive skills underlying the production of the repertoire and the role of intentionality is important because these skills are cognitively demanding and are a prerequisite in human infants for their ability to acquire language (Baldwin, 1995, Olson, 1993. My research suggests that chimpanzee gestural communication is cognitively complex and may be homologous with the cognitive skills evident in pre-verbal infants on the cusp of language acquisition.Chimpanzees display a multifaceted and complex signal repertoire of manual gestures. These gestures are the prototypes, within which there is variation, and between which the iv boundaries are not clear-cut, but there is gradation apparent along several morphological components. Both wild and language trained chimpanzees communicate intentionally about their perceived desires and the actions that they want the recipients to undertake. They do not just express their emotions, but they communicate flexibly by adjusting their communicative tactics in response to the comprehension states of the recipient. Whilst chimpanzees communicate their intentions flexibly, the messages conveyed are specific. However, recipients comprehend gestures flexibly in light of the signaller"s overall intentions.Whilst wild and language trained chimpanzee gestural communication revealed similar cognitive characteristics, language trained chimpanzees outperformed wild apes in that they had ability to use signals which made distinctions that human deictic words can make. Whilst these differences between wild and language trained chimpanzees may be due to the different methodological approaches used, it is conceivable that language training may have influenced captive ape cognitive skills in the representational domain. These results from wild and language trained chimpanzees indicate that chimpanzees possess some form of cognitive skills necessary for language development and that cognitive skills underlying repertoire and use in chimpanzees are a shared capacity between humans, other apes and a common ancestor. These findings render theories of the gestural origins of language more plausible.v

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“…(For a similar point of view for the emergence of pointing in infancy, see Camaioni, 1992;Baron-Cohen, 1994). Indeed, leaning heavily upon the argument by analogy, a number of researchers have claimed that chimpanzees do, in fact, 'point' in precisely this manner (see Leavens, Hopkins, & Bard, 1996;Krause & Fouts, 1997;Miles, 1990).…”

Section: Pointingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward a science of other minds: escaping the argument by analogy

2000

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Since Darwin, the idea of psychological continuity between humans and other animals has dominated theory and research in investigating the minds of other species. Indeed, the field of comparative psychology was founded on two assumptions. First, it was assumed that introspection could provide humans with reliable knowledge about the causal connection between specific mental states and specific behaviors. Second, it was assumed that in those cases in which other species exhibited behaviors similar to our own, similar psychological causes were at work. In this paper. we show how this argument by analogy is flawed with respect to the case of second-order mental states. As a test case, we focus on the question of how other species conceive of visual attention, and in particular whether chimpanzees interpret seeing as a mentalistic event involving internal states of perception, attention, and belief. We conclude that chimpanzees do not reason about seeing in this manner, and indeed, there is considerable reason to suppose that they do not harbor representations of mental states in general. We propose a reinterpretation model in which the majority of the rich social behaviors that humans and other primates share in common emerged long before the human lineage evolved the psychological means of interpreting those behaviors in mentalistic terms. Although humans, chimpanzees, and most other species may be said to possess mental states, humans alone may have evolved a cognitive specialization for reasoning about such states.

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Indexical and referential pointing in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).

Cited by 205 publications

References 28 publications

Orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) point to inform a human about the location of a tool

Orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) point to inform a human about the location of a tool

Usage and comprehension of manual gestures in wild chimpanzees

Toward a science of other minds: escaping the argument by analogy

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