Tactical use of unimodal and bimodal communication by chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

By David A. Leavens, Autumn B. Hostetter, Michael J. Wesley, William D. Hopkins. 2004

177 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Do chimpanzees tailor their communication in accordance with the attentional status of a human observer? We presented 57 chimpanzees with three experimental conditions in randomized order: an experimenter offered a banana to the focal subject (Focal), to a cagemate of the focal subject (In-Cage) and to a chimpanzee in an adjacent cage (Adjacent) while a second experimenter recorded the first and second responses of the focal subject in all three conditions. The chimpanzees' behaviour was mostly visual or bimodal in the Focal condition, changing to auditory behaviour or disengagement in the In-Cage and Adjacent conditions. Thus, with no explicit training and on their first trials in all instances, the chimpanzees tactically deployed their communicative behaviours in the visual and auditory domains in accordance with the manipulated attentional and intentional status of a human observer.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Developmental Biology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/66f9dde4717ddd8465b325aadc7b8aa78b2f3b52

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

To move or not to move: How apes adjust to the attentional state of others (2004, background): “Experimentally, this is supported by Leavens et al. (2004) who found that 7 chimpanzees adjust their communicative behavior according to the attentional orientation of a human experimenter.”
The gap is social: Human shared intentionality and culture (2010, background): “When another human came in, the chimpanzees pointed to the food so that the human would get it for him (pointing was usually done with the whole hand, but some points were produced with just the index finger; see also Leavens et al. 2004).”
Vocal greeting behaviour in wild chimpanzee females (2010, unknown): “More likely, both gestural communication and vocal communication are susceptible to the same cognitive processes and architecture that govern social behaviour in primates (Leavens et al. 2004, 2010; Slocombe & Zuberbühler 2007; Townsend et al. 2008).”