The role of past interactions in great apes’ communication about absent entities
Abstract
Recent evidence suggests that great apes can use the former location of an entity to communicate about it. In this study we built on these findings to investigate the social cognitive foundations of great apes’ communicative abilities. We tested whether great apes (n = 35) would adjust their requests for absent entities to previous interactions they had with their interlocutor. We manipulated the apes’ experience with respect to the interlocutor’s knowledge about the previous content of the now empty location, as well as their experience with the interlocutor’s competence to provide additional food items. We found that apes adjusted their requests to both of these aspects but failed to integrate them with one another. These results demonstrate a surprising amount of flexibility in great apes’ communicative abilities while at the same time suggesting some important limitations in their social communicative skills.
Citation
Bohn , M , Call , J & Tomasello , M 2016 , ' The role of past interactions in great apes’ communication about absent entities ' , Journal of Comparative Psychology , vol. 130 , no. 4 , pp. 351-357 . https://doi.org/10.1037/com0000042
Publication
Journal of Comparative Psychology
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0735-7036Type
Journal article
Description
M. Bohn was supported by a scholarship of the German National Academic Foundation. J. Call was supported by the “SOMICS” ERC-Synergy grant (nr. 609819).Collections
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