Bonobo and chimpanzee gestures share multiple meanings

Date:  February 27, 2018

Source:  University of York

Summary:

Two closely related great ape species, the bonobo and chimpanzee, use gestures that share the same meaning researchers have found.

Chimpanzees and bonobos use gestures in a variety of different situations and for multiple purposes, such as to initiate and change positions during grooming.

Continued  

Horses understand human gestures

Presented by

Zoe Gough

Horses (Equus caballus) were first domesticated around 6,000 years ago and have performed many important roles since then, but their ability to understand the gestures of their human handlers remained unstudied until fairly recently.

To date research has suggested that while horses are able to understand some signals, such as pointing, they are only able to use these signals when the human remains near to the reward. 

Their level of ability has previously been said to be similar to that of goats and cats, they are able to use human gestures even though they cannot be said to understand the meaning attached to the gesture.

Continued ...

Researchers Create Glossary Of Gestures Used By Wild Chimpanzees

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

For the first time, scientists from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland have decoded the meaning behind the various gestures that chimpanzees use to communicate with one another, observing more than 80 wild Ugandan primates in order to compile a glossary of their hand and body movements.

Writing in the July 2 edition of the journal Current Biology, St. Andrews primatologists Dr. Catherine Hobaiter and Professor Richard Byrne explained that they monitored wild chimpanzees in the rainforests of the African nation and discovered that the creatures use a total of 66 gestures to intentionally communicate 19 different and unique meanings.

According to Tom Brooks-Pollock of The Telegraph, among the gestures detected by Hobaiter and Byrne included tapping another chimp in order to ask them to stop doing something, flirting by nibbling on a leaf, making a flinging motion with the hand to ask another chimp to move away, and raising an arm in order to ask for an object.

The study authors said their findings confirm the long-held notion that the creatures most closely related to humans biologically truly do have a purpose when they communicate with each other. While experts had known that they used gestures to communicate, this is the first study to successfully figure out what they are saying.

Hobaiter told BBC News that these gestures were the only form of intentional communication ever recorded by non-human animals, making people and chimps the only creatures with a system of communication through which they can deliberately send messages to one another.

Read more at

How Similar Are the Gestures of Apes and Human Infants? More Than You Might Suspect

June 6, 2013 — Psychologists who analyzed video footage of a female chimpanzee, a female bonobo and a female human infant in a study to compare different types of gestures at comparable stages of communicative development found remarkable similarities among the three species.

This is the first time such data have been used to compare the development of gestures across species. The chimpanzee and bonobo, formerly called the "pygmy chimpanzee," are the two species most closely related to humans in the evolutionary tree.

"The similarity in the form and function of the gestures in a human infant, a baby chimpanzee and a baby bonobo was remarkable," said Patricia Greenfield, a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UCLA and co-author of the study, published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychology.

Gestures made by all three species included reaching, pointing with fingers or the head, and raising the arms to ask to be picked up. The researchers called "striking" the finding that the gestures of all three species were "predominantly communicative," Greenfield said.

To be classified as communicative, a gesture had to include eye contact with the conversational partner, be accompanied by vocalization (non-speech sounds) or include a visible behavioral effort to elicit a response. The same standard was used for all three species. For all three, gestures were usually accompanied by one or more behavioral signs of an intention to communicate.

Read on

Chimpanzees' 66 gestures revealed

Wild chimpanzees use at least 66 distinct gestures to communicate with each other, according to scientists.


A team of researchers from the University of St Andrews in Scotland filmed a group of the animals in order to decipher this "gestural repertoire".

The team then studied 120 hours of footage of the chimps interacting, looking for signs that the animals were intentionally signalling to each other.

The findings are published in the journal Animal Cognition.

Previous studies on captive chimps have suggested the animals have about 30 different gestures.

"So this [result] shows quite a large repertoire," lead researcher Dr Catherine Hobaiter told BBC News.

"We think people previously were only seeing fractions of this, because when you study the animals in captivity you don't see all their behaviour.

"You wouldn't see them hunting for monkeys, taking females away on 'courtships', or encountering neighbouring groups of chimpanzees."

Dr Hobaiter spent 266 days observing and filming a group of chimpanzees in Budongo Conservation Field Station, Uganda.

"I've spent two years studying these animals, so they know me," she said. "I follow them through the forest and they just ignore me completely and get on with their daily lives."


She and her colleague, Professor Richard Byrne, scrutinised the footage and categorised each distinct gesture.

They looked for clear signs that the animals were making deliberate movements that were intended to generate a response from another animal.

"We looked to see if the gesturer was looking at their audience," explained Professor Byrne.

"And we looked for persistence; if their action did not produce a result, they would repeat it."

The team is still studying the footage for the next stage of their project - to figure out what each gesture means.

For some of these gestures, the meaning seems obvious to us, perhaps because - as great apes- we make similar movements. A chimp will often beckon to another group member, or a youngster will hand shake at another juvenile to entice it to play.

In one piece of footage captured by Dr Hobaiter, a mother reaches with her left arm towards her daughter.


"The mother wants to move away and is gesturing to request that her daughter 'climbs on' her," Dr Hobaiter explained.

"She could just grab her daughter, but she doesn't. She reaches and holds the gesture while waiting for a response."

When the youngster starts to approach, the mother repeats the gesture and adds a facial expression - a "bare-teeth grin", at which point the daughter climbs on and they move away.

"But actions often have effects that their maker did not intend," said Professor Byrne.

"So to understand the intended meaning, it's no good just discovering a gesture's typical effect. We have to look for what effect makes the signaller stop gesturing and appear satisfied and content with the outcome, to be sure that that was what they intended."

The results have provided clues about the origins of chimps' gestures, suggesting that they are a common system of communication across the species, rather than each movement being a learned custom or ritual within one social group.

In fact, by comparing these observations with those of gestures made by gorillas and orangutans, the researchers showed there was significant overlap in the signals used throughout the family of great apes.

Dr Hobaiter said: This supports our belief that the gestures that apes use (and maybe some human gestures too) are derived from ancient shared ancestry of all the great ape species alive today."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9475000/9475408.stm






By Victoria Gill

Science and nature reporter, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9475000/9475408.stm