Do Primates Know What They’re Communicating When Gesturing?

Many state that primates are very intelligent species. Does this mean that they can understand one another through gestures? This article titled “Semantics of primate gestures: intentional meanings of orangutan gestures” was written by Erica Cartmill and Richard Byrne. It touches on the rarely addressed topic of whether an animals’ species gestures carry specific meanings. This study was also done on orangutans in European Zoos! How cool is that?

As mentioned above the focus of this experiment was to determine whether these orangutans used intentional gestures to communicate. A systematic approach was set up to test this. They recorded videos of the orangutans’ social interactions. They did this without any constraints. Social interactions included coordinated locomotion, playing, object manipulation, or foraging. The recording were done between 5 to 7 hours for 5 days, but the animals were not recorded during rest, solitary feeding, and solitary play. In the end, a total of 50 hours of observations was recorded at each site. The potential gestures were then coded, and to be sure if the gestures found were intentional, they ran an additional exercise to test them. In the end, about 1,344 gestures were found and then narrowed down to 62 gestures. Of the 64 gestures, 40 had frequent goal–outcome matches were then analysed for meaning. It was found out that 29 of these gestures were used repeatedly with a specific meaning. Some of these gestures were the following: shaking object, wave, raise arm, hit, back roll, nudge, and more.

The results of this article show that there’s a tighter relationship between gestures and goals. An implication of this study could be that there wasn’t enough time to observe the orangutans behavior to assume their gestures goals fully. The orangutans were observed for only 5 days, so I think more time could have impacted the results of this study. Tying it back to the beginning, this article touches on the huge subject whether animals use gestures to communicate with one another, and the answer from this study is yes.

Reference:

Cartmill, E. A., & Bryne, R. W. (2010). Semantics of primate gestures: intentional meanings of orangutan gestures. Original Paper, 10  (7).