Abstract
Orang-utans played a communication game in two studies testing their ability to produce and comprehend requestive pointing. While the ‘communicator’ could see but not obtain hidden food, the ‘donor’ could release the food to the communicator, but could not see its location for herself. They could coordinate successfully if the communicator pointed to the food, and if the donor comprehended his communicative goal and responded pro-socially. In Study 1, one orang-utan pointed regularly and accurately for peers. However, they responded only rarely. In Study 2, a human experimenter played the communicator’s role in three conditions, testing the apes’ comprehension of points of different heights and different degrees of ostension. There was no effect of condition. However, across conditions one donor performed well individually, and as a group orang-utans’ comprehension performance tended towards significance. We explain this on the grounds that comprehension required inferences that they found difficult – but not impossible. The finding has valuable implications for our thinking about the development of pointing in phylogeny.
Highlights
Pointing is a form of intentional, referential communication that has been hypothesised to play a foundational role in human communicative and cognitive development [1]
For coordination to be possible, the recipient of a point must be able to make potentially difficult inferences about her interlocutor’s communicative goal–both identifying the referent of the point, and PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone
While three females (Pini, Padana, and Raaja) responded to over half of the points that Bimbo produced for them, Kila and Dokana were almost totally unresponsive–meaning that the overall response rate to Bimbo’s points was just 43%. This lack of responsiveness sometimes led Bimbo to display signs of frustration–including sulking, which he did by turning his back on the apparatus and facing the wall, and hitting out at the apparatus
Summary
Pointing is a form of intentional, referential communication that has been hypothesised to play a foundational role in human communicative and cognitive development [1]. By enabling communicators to coordinate their behaviour with respect to a distal feature of the environment, it can facilitate numerous activities that are central to the development of human culture–including language acquisition and pedagogy. It was likely fundamental in enabling our early hominin ancestors to engage in the large game hunting that supported an increasingly carnivorous diet and which, in turn, supported further cognitive growth [2]. For coordination to be possible, the recipient of a point must be able to make potentially difficult inferences about her interlocutor’s communicative goal–both identifying the referent of the point (the ‘referential intention’), and PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0129726 June 19, 2015
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