Why Don't Apes Point?

By Michael Tomasello. 2006

170 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Chimpanzees gesture to one another regularly. Although some of their gestures are relatively inflexible displays invariably elicited by particular environmental events, an important subset are learned by individuals and used flexibly—such things as ―arm raise‖ to elicit play or ―touch side‖ to request nursing. We know that such gestures are learned because in many cases only some individuals use them, and indeed several observers have noted the existence of idiosyncratic gestures used by only single individuals (Goodall 1986). And their flexible use has been repeatedly documented in the sense of a single gesture being used for multiple communicative ends, and the same communicative end being served by multiple gestures (Tomasello et al. 1985, 1989). Flexible use is also evident in the fact that apes only use their visually based gestures such as ―arm raise‖ when the recipient is already visually oriented toward them—so-called audience effects (Kaminski et al. 2004; Tomasello et al. 1994, 1997). Chimpanzees and other great apes also know quite a bit about what other individuals do and do not see. They follow the gaze direction of conspecifics to relatively distal locations (Tomasello et al. 1998), and they even follow another’s gaze direction around and behind barriers to locate specific targets (Tomasello et al. 1999). This gaze following is not an inflexible response to a stimulus, as from a certain age chimpanzees look where another individual is looking and, if they find nothing interesting on that line of sight, check back a second time and try again (Call et al. 2000). Indeed if a chimpanzee follows another’s line of sight and repeatedly finds nothing there, they will quit following that individual’s gaze altogether (Tomasello et al.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2dcf565acd4890b6c04d4607cb512146712a1197

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Citations in the corpus

Primary and secondary pragmatic functions of pointing gestures (2007, background): “This ensemble of features is characteristic of infants’ primordial pointing gesture whose function is to inform or otherwise purposely establish focal joint attention (Liszkowski, 2006; Tomasello, 2006).”
Shared intentionality. (2007, background): “Further, they did not use shared common ground to infer the exact referent of a looker's gaze, as do 1-year- old human infants (Moll, Koring, Carpenter & Tomasello, 2006).”
Language as a Tool for Interacting Minds (2010, background): “2 Language as a Tool for Alignment of Attention It has been suggested that humans are the only species that point to share experiences (Tomasello, 2006).”
Perspective-Taking and its Foundation in Joint Attention (2011, background): “While non-human primates seem to point only imperatively, using others as "social tools" (Bates, Camaioni, and Volterra, 1975) to get them what they want (Tomasello, 2006; but see Racine, Leavens, Susswein, and Wehera, 2008), human infants point for a variety of motives.”
Human Culture in Evolutionary Perspective (2010, background): “When apes beg a human for food, they take into account whether • the human can see their gesture (Kaminski, Call, & Tomasello, 2004 ; Liebal, Pika, Call, & Tomasello, 2004 ).”
A new look at infant pointing. (2007, background): “…choose means for pursuing goals, thus forming intentions, and they are even able to discern some of the reasons why an actor chooses one particular means over another (Carpenter, Call, & Tomasello, 2005; Gergely, Bekkering, & Király, 2002; Schwier, van Maanen, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2006).”