Gestural Communication in Apes

Question 1

Humans linked to monkeys

Answer 1

No chimpanzee/gorilla or orangutan is more closely related to a monkey than humans are. The blue box shows we’re all closely related. You have to go way back in time- at least 25/ 30 million years before you find a common ancestor between us and monkeys.
We’re only very distantly related to monkeys. The idea here is that if we study the living representatives of our country, closest living relatives, then we might get an idea about the cognitive and communicative capacities of the last common ancestor of humans and the other great apes.

Question 2

Reference

Answer 2

• The acquired ability to capture and direct the attention of a social partner to a specific entity.
  Two ways humans do this:
• Verbally (e.g., “the fat tabby cat that sat on the hat and fell with a splat onto the mat; that cat”).
• Non-verbally
  -Showing (holding up, as for another’s inspection).
  -Placing (e.g., putting merchandise on a counter next to the till).
  -Pointing (with index finger, with lips, with whole hand, with ostensive looking, etc.).

Question 3

Semiotic Triangle

Answer 3

Symbolic or linguistic reference is irreducibly conceptual.
* Arbitrary relationship between word and referent.- dog doesn’t sound like dog
* Internal representationsof the world.
* Semantic lexicon - which is essentially vocabulary

Question 4

Linguistic Reference

Answer 4

“3d. The act or state of referring through which one term or concept is related or connected to another or to objects in the world. . .” OED

Expression has a dual meaning- can refer to a wealthy person or overweight cat.

Question 5

Functional reference

Answer 5

So, people who study animals have discovered differenced concepts of reference

Definition:
Functionally referential calls “have the common property of external designata, all of which are relatively specific in nature” (Marler et al., 1992, p. 69)

Question 6

Functional reference
Examples

Answer 6

Alarm Calls (e.g., Struhsaker, 1967; Seyfarth et al., 1980; Gouzoules et al., 1984, 1985, etc.)
Food calls (Slocombe & Zuberbuhler, 2006)

Question 7

Semiotic Triangle- looking at it by functional reference

Answer 7

Functional reference is symbol-like.
Arbitrary relationship between call and referent.
Call repertoire; groupresponses implicate ashared code.
“Arbitrariness is accepted as one criterion for differentiating symbols from icons” (Seyfarth, Cheney, Marler, 1980, p. 1091).

Everything thats in the red oval is not available to the objective sciences- researchers studying
the behaviour of animals. We don’t have direct access to their internal mental processes.

These disciplines are concerned with relationships between these external, objectively measurable elements calls aspects of external reality and how they are associated with things in the world.

Question 8

Vervet monkeys

Answer 8

Vervet monkeys sense specific calls for predators and have a particular reaction
Eg. when they hear this call- run up to trees. Or snake- they all stand up to see where the snake is.

Question 9

What is gestural reference?

Answer 9

An allusion or directing of attention to some thing or person

Question 10

Semiotic Triangle

Answer 10

Gestural or nonverbal reference has a nonarbitrary, or identical relationship with referent.
Ability to use and comprehend pointing gestures implies an understanding of the gesture as a deictic device.
Key point: in Gestural Reference, the gesture does not stand for the referent. It indicates it, it’s an index.

Question 11

Gestural Repertoires among Apes

Answer 11

They look similar but they are different species

Question 12

Dyadic Gestures

Answer 12

Great ape species have dyadic gestures

left- female approaching male with her hand held out- this would be interpreted as an appeasement gesture- she’s saying don’t beat me up, I want to approach. So using caution when approaching male.

Question 13

Triadic Gestures

Answer 13

Left- Chester is looking directly at the recipient whilst gesturing towards the food- forming a pivot point of what we would call a referential triangle in the use of gesture (about fruit)

Right- Noko- using a gesture in a referential manner-while looking at the camera person he’s
gesturing towards another individual who is holding desirable food

Question 14

Broadcast Gestures (Display)

Answer 14

Many signalling by great apes aren’t directly to recipient, many gestures are broadcast gestures.

Other gestures are a bit more ambiguous

Question 15

Elbow Raise (what does it mean?)

Answer 15

Infant crawls around the back and the mother moves

Question 16

Intentionality- different definitions

Answer 16

Like reference, a term with multiple contemporary and historical uses.

In Philosophy: “the quality of mental states (e.g. thoughts, beliefs, desires, hopes) which consists in their being directed towards some object or state of affairs” (Google). Key people: Brentano, Dennett, Premack
So this is that branch of the semiotic triangle that goes from concept to reality. And it’s so related to this hypothetical model of the world that many folksers and cognitive scientists believe humans walk around with.

In Folk Psychology: the states of mind (desires, beliefs, intentions) that cause behaviour. Implies that actions are the result of these hidden psychological states. Key people: Premack, Tomasello

In Developmental Psychology: The emerging abilities of human children to understand others in terms of their intentions, desires, and beliefs; i.e., the development of a theory of mind. Key people: Tomasello, Gopnik

Consequently, the study of the emergence of intentional communication in human children is largely concerned with children’s theories of mind.

Question 17

Communication: Information Theoretic Approaches

Answer 17

Information source- a message gets encoded to a signal, is transmitted through some channel and then that signal is received and recoded and the original message is reconstructed at the destination

This model is good to capture the transmission of spoken language or speech

Question 18

Language and the Shannon-Waever Mathematical Model, 1949
+ criticism

Answer 18

Language fits this model well:
- Shared code
- Linear , serially ordered structure (S->R)
- Assumption of a pre-existing message to be encoded and transmitted

However, people are critical of this model on how its influenced contemporary models of non-linguistic communication

Question 19

Non-linguistic communication: Telementational Model

Answer 19

There are these mental states such as intention that are encoded into communicating organisms, behaviour which are transmitted in some modality, visual, auditory and then interpreted by the receiver and then through some sort of a process eg. reconstructed or an inference is made, and the signals, intentions, then, are recoverable through this hypothetical process.

In this model, we don’t really have any explanation of what causes these mental states. They are theoretical constructs that we don’t actually measure, they are hypothetical.

Question 20

Operationalising Intentional Communication in Apes

Frans X. Plooij
Kim A. Bard

Answer 20

Frans- studied how young chimpanzees play and displayed features associated with the development of intentional communication in humans

Kim took these principles and demonstrated how they existed in communicative patterns of mother infant dyads in free ranging orangutans.

Question 21

Criterion 1: Socially used (audience presence)

Answer 21

Its been repeatedly shown that chimpanzees discriminate the presence of a human recipient in their gestural behaviour.
Here are a variety of different experimental situations.
* the red bars is the percent a manual just gestures displayed in the presence of a human
* the sort of green, yellow, green bars are the percentage of manual gestures
You can clearly see from the pattern that this criterion is met in the gestural communication of great apes. They don’t gesture if there’s no one there to see them gesture.

Question 22

Criterion 2: Gaze Alternation

Answer 22

Chimpanzees were categorised in the following.

Theres a clear association between the person and banana in this context and communication in this study.

This has been replicated in other studies.

We can see that there’s this strong association a gaze alternation with a gestural signaling

Question 23

Criterion 3: Sensitive to attentional state of recipient

Answer 23

Tom Solo and his his collaborators who first reported that chimpanzees are sensitive to whether the recipient is looking at them in terms of their display of visual behavior.
Pink box shows data that supports this sensitivity.

In their first study, no chimpanzee displayed a visual signal if the recipient wasn’t looking at them. So the chimpanzee’s discriminated the attentional state of the recent in their visual signaling behavior.

Question 24

Criteria 4-6: Attention-getting behaviour, persistence, elaboration

Answer 24

A video of a chimpanzee showing attention getting behaviour, persistence and elaboration in her signaling.
Outside the female chimpanzee’s cage is a pile of bananas and then there’s a human being who is not paying any attention to her on purpose.
The behaviours displayed meets the criteria for intentional communication

Question 25

Persistence and Meaning

Answer 25

Situation where we’re the timing of a series of events was rigidly controlled.

• This is a chimpanzee in a cage, and in this experiment we put some primate chow on one side of their cage and a banana here on the other side. Showed chimpanzees much preferred banana.
• A second experimenter would come and would either deliver the banana or primate chow and measured whether the chimpanzees continue to gesture
• Third condition is half banana condition (control)- graph shows theres no significant decrement ion their propensity to gesture when given half a banana
• What we see is that when they got all of the chimpanzees to communicate about the banana, or at least when they communicated they communicated about the banana so when they got the banana we interpreted that as a successful communicative episode, and when they didn’t get the whole banana (whether they got half a banana or the protein or primate chow) we interpreted that as being less successful communicative attempts.
• shaded grey bars show individuals who gestured after delay of food is that the chimpanzees themselves persisted in gestural communication when they got what they weren’t communicating about which was the whole banana. No chimpanzee who got the whole banana went on to continue to gesture in the study.
  This was extended to orangutans

Question 26

Meaning

Answer 26

All gestures are, by themselves, meaningless to observers. Observers need:
(a) A learning history with the gesture that is influenced by
(b) Antecedents of gestural signals (behaviour, context)
(c) Consequences of gestural signals (receiver’s responses)
Contemporary explorations into gesture meaning examine social contexts prior to gesture display and social consequences of gesture display, to derive meaning. Increasingly, persistence in signaling is taken as evidence for communication failure and cessation of signaling is taken as evidence of communication success.

Question 27

Chimpanzee Repertoires

Answer 27

Analyzed how many gestures across different wild and captive sites we’re common in chimpanzees in three different places.
What they essentially found was that 84% of the gestures were in common across these wild sites among chimpanzees

Question 28

Meanings Determined by Response Frequencies

Answer 28

And they went on to develop an interpretation of the meetings of these by looking at the most frequent response to the various gestures, and they classified them in 3 different ways.
They call it a tight association, if the reaction of the of the recipient was a very, very frequent response to the signal.

Question 29

Meanings Determined by Apparently Satisfactory Outcome

Answer 29

They talked about the apparently satisfactory outcome, and they noted that different kinds of gestures have different sort of breadths of meaning, so that the directed push seems to have multiple, apparently satisfactory outcomes as measured by the lack of continued gesturing by the signaler. So there are lots of responses that that this seem to constitute a stopping world for signaling, or the directed push.

Question 30

Developmental Origins: what are the 3 camps?

Answer 30

• Ontogenetic Ritualisation
• Co-constructed in Social Interaction
• Biologically Determined Species Repertoires

Question 31

Ontogenetic Ritualisation

Answer 31

1. Chimpanzee babies actively take food from mothers’ mouths
2. Then they hold their hands very close to the mother’s mouth
3. Then they display a begging gesture from a distance
   The begging gesture becomes ritualised from a physical tool to catchany falling food to a social tool to request food.
   A ritualised gesture is an abbreviated version of a mechanically effective act.
   Evidence: High variability in gesture forms across different ape groups of the same species.
   See:

Question 32

Biologically Determined Species

Answer 32

Repertoire
1. There is a very large species-typical repertoire
2. Each individual displays a subset of the full repertoire
3. There is high concordance in gesture meaning across groups
4. Evidence for variability in captive studies is attributable to the overwhelming influence of predominantly play contexts, which renders a biased perception of inter-group variability.
In much the same way that vervet monkey infants will display an “eagle” alarm call for any falling object and then learn to display the call to only particular predatory birds, apes will display gestures, many of which they will learn to display in proper social contexts.
“the great majority of gorilla gestures are part of a species typical repertoire, albeit one of unusually large size” Genty et al. (2009)

Question 33

Co-construction of Meaning

Answer 33

1. Some gestures appear to be largely innate (wrist present)
2. Little support for ontogenetic ritualization, except that
   gestures are shaped through dyadic interaction (tickling)
3. Additionally, some gestures seem neither innate nor ritualised from mechanically effective actions: individual pairs achieve a negotiated understanding of a gesture’s meaning (grooming)
   “For example, in initiating grooming, we found a constellation of behaviors that could be used as a gesture to initiate grooming, most of which were not effective actions, but all shared a single communicative meaning” (Bard et al., 2014, p. 26)

Question 34

Gestural Theory of Language Origins

Answer 34

1. Like speech, ape gestures are manifestly intentional (voluntary; e.g., Leavens & Hopkins, 1998)
2. Like speech, ape gestures reflect left cerebral hemisphere dominance (e.g., Hopkins & Leavens, 1998)
3. Like humans, apes are even more right-handed when they vocalise while gesturing (e.g., Hopkins & Leavens, 1998; Hopkins & Wesley, 2002; Hopkins & Cantero, 2003)