Week 3 tutorial briefing

Homologies in gestural communication?

In this week’s lecture and associated readings we have been looking at animal communication - the gap between their rich mental lives and what their communication system allows them to express, but also some cases where animal communication systems appear to share important features with human language (in particular, intentionality and structure). For this tutorial we will look at animal communication from a different perspective, reading Graham & Hobaiter (2023), which describes an experiment investigating comprehension of ape gestures by humans. If you are interested in reading about production of ape-like gestures by young children, optionally check out Kersken et al. (2019).

Before or after reading Graham & Hobaiter (2023), run through a version of their experiment yourself: you can either use a demo version of the experiment they provide, which is close to the actual task the participants completed but which doesn’t provide feedback on individual answers, or a similar version created by the BBC, which includes answer-by-answer feedback. As you work through one of these versions of the experiment, reflect on how you are making your guesses. NB these definitely work in Chrome, if you have problems using a different browser switch to Chrome or Edge.

Questions:

What is the paper about? What did they do? What did they find?
What do you think the strengths of their experimental method are? What are the weaknesses? How could these be fixed?
Do their conclusions follow from the results they present? Are there additional (perhaps inconvenient!) conclusions they could have drawn but didn’t?
How do you think these gestures became established in ape populations? For inspiration you could think back to the example of the wolf baring its teeth or the pictionary games we discussed briefly in lecture 1.
How do you think human participants are able to interpret these gestures? How did you interpret them? Do you think these mechanisms are the same or different as those used by the apes in the videos?
After reading the paper and discussing these issues, what conclusion do you draw on the question of whether (aspects of) the gestural communication systems of apes and humans are homologous?

References

Graham, K. E., & Hobaiter, C. (2023). Towards a great ape dictionary: inexperienced humans understand common nonhuman ape gestures. PLoS Biology, 21, e3001939. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001939

Kersken, V., Gómez, J. C., Liszkowski, U., Soldati, A., & Hobaiter, C. (2019). A gestural repertoire of 1-to 2-year-old human children: in search of the ape gestures. Animal Cognition, 22, 577-595. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-018-1213-z

Re-use

All aspects of this work are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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