Chimps, Children, and Understanding Gestures
Human communication is remarkably flexible and fluid, and the way that humans communicate with each other can range widely, from complex verbal communication to hand gestures and other movements. Many animal advocates know intuitively that animals can and do communicate with each other in similar ways, even in the absence of “language” as humans generally perceive it. For many years, scientists have studied animal communication, sometimes in the wild and sometimes in laboratories. This study aimed to explore how human children and chimpanzees understand “iconic gestures,” which are often used to indicate “displaced referents outside of the immediate perceptual context.” For example, if you wanted a glass of water, and needed to communicate that to someone across a noisy or crowded room, you might pretend to hold a glass and drink from it. That’s an iconic gesture, and the purpose of this study was to see if chimpanzees showed a capacity to understand such gestures, compared to young human children.
Using 11 chimps at the Primate Research Center in Leipzig, Germany, researchers set out to “use gestures to refer to actions that played an important role in a joint activity in a specific location.” What they found through was that “4-year-old children, unlike chimpanzees, spontaneously chose the correct location” when shown iconic gestures. That being said, the authors qualify this by noting that neither species was able to “quickly associate arbitrary gestures with one of the locations,” and that chimpanzees did learn to understand and respond to the iconic gestures over time. The researchers note that “most likely, chimpanzees did not recognize that the experimenter used the gesture to communicate relevant information to them.” It’s speculative, but it seems probable that even 4-year old humans would have some degree of existing cultural reference for iconic gestures, while captive chimpanzees would not.
For animal advocates, this study shows that there is a great deal of interest in understanding to what degree other species communicate like humans. Unfortunately, many of the studies looking at this topic happen in laboratories, and specifically with captive primates. When we think of alternatives to research, we often think of invasive procedures or medical tests. Our curiosity about the subject of language is understandable, but in our push for alternatives to animal research, advocates need to consider studies such as this; while they may not be invasive, they still perpetuate the captivity and use of animals for human purposes.