2006 - Monday May, 15th, 4 - 6 pm
CNRS, Campus Gérard-Mégie, Auditorium Marie Curie
Paris
The intentional communication of great apes
Apes communicate with conspecifics most flexibly in the gestural domain, including adapting to the attentional state of the recipient. They use both intention movements (abbreviations of social actions that become communicative within a specific interactive context) and attention getters (actions that gain the attention of others to the self in a wide variety of contexts). All of these are basically dyadic - aimed at regulating the social interaction directly - not triadic in the sense of referring to external entities. They are also all basically "competitive" - aimed at getting the signaler what she wants - not co-operative in the sense of sharing psychological states. Interestingly, when interacting with humans many apes do learn to "point" to things they want triadically. But these "points" are action imperatives only ; they are not co-operative in the human sense (and may not even be truly referential), as evidenced by the fact that these pointing apes still do not understand when humans point for them informatively.
