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Bonobo and chimpanzee gestures overlap extensively in meaning

Cross-species comparison of great ape gesturing has so far been limited to the physical form of gestures in the repertoire, without questioning whether gestures share the same meanings. Researchers have recently catalogued the meanings of chimpanzee gestures, but little is known about the gesture me...

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Autores principales: Graham, Kirsty E., Hobaiter, Catherine, Ounsley, James, Furuichi, Takeshi, Byrne, Richard W.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5828348/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29485994
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2004825
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author Graham, Kirsty E.
Hobaiter, Catherine
Ounsley, James
Furuichi, Takeshi
Byrne, Richard W.
author_facet Graham, Kirsty E.
Hobaiter, Catherine
Ounsley, James
Furuichi, Takeshi
Byrne, Richard W.
author_sort Graham, Kirsty E.
collection PubMed
description Cross-species comparison of great ape gesturing has so far been limited to the physical form of gestures in the repertoire, without questioning whether gestures share the same meanings. Researchers have recently catalogued the meanings of chimpanzee gestures, but little is known about the gesture meanings of our other closest living relative, the bonobo. The bonobo gestural repertoire overlaps by approximately 90% with that of the chimpanzee, but such overlap might not extend to meanings. Here, we first determine the meanings of bonobo gestures by analysing the outcomes of gesturing that apparently satisfy the signaller. Around half of bonobo gestures have a single meaning, while half are more ambiguous. Moreover, all but 1 gesture type have distinct meanings, achieving a different distribution of intended meanings to the average distribution for all gesture types. We then employ a randomisation procedure in a novel way to test the likelihood that the observed between-species overlap in the assignment of meanings to gestures would arise by chance under a set of different constraints. We compare a matrix of the meanings of bonobo gestures with a matrix for those of chimpanzees against 10,000 randomised iterations of matrices constrained to the original data at 4 different levels. We find that the similarity between the 2 species is much greater than would be expected by chance. Bonobos and chimpanzees share not only the physical form of the gestures but also many gesture meanings.
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spelling pubmed-58283482018-03-19 Bonobo and chimpanzee gestures overlap extensively in meaning Graham, Kirsty E. Hobaiter, Catherine Ounsley, James Furuichi, Takeshi Byrne, Richard W. PLoS Biol Research Article Cross-species comparison of great ape gesturing has so far been limited to the physical form of gestures in the repertoire, without questioning whether gestures share the same meanings. Researchers have recently catalogued the meanings of chimpanzee gestures, but little is known about the gesture meanings of our other closest living relative, the bonobo. The bonobo gestural repertoire overlaps by approximately 90% with that of the chimpanzee, but such overlap might not extend to meanings. Here, we first determine the meanings of bonobo gestures by analysing the outcomes of gesturing that apparently satisfy the signaller. Around half of bonobo gestures have a single meaning, while half are more ambiguous. Moreover, all but 1 gesture type have distinct meanings, achieving a different distribution of intended meanings to the average distribution for all gesture types. We then employ a randomisation procedure in a novel way to test the likelihood that the observed between-species overlap in the assignment of meanings to gestures would arise by chance under a set of different constraints. We compare a matrix of the meanings of bonobo gestures with a matrix for those of chimpanzees against 10,000 randomised iterations of matrices constrained to the original data at 4 different levels. We find that the similarity between the 2 species is much greater than would be expected by chance. Bonobos and chimpanzees share not only the physical form of the gestures but also many gesture meanings. Public Library of Science 2018-02-27 /pmc/articles/PMC5828348/ /pubmed/29485994 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2004825 Text en © 2018 Graham et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Graham, Kirsty E.
Hobaiter, Catherine
Ounsley, James
Furuichi, Takeshi
Byrne, Richard W.
Bonobo and chimpanzee gestures overlap extensively in meaning
title Bonobo and chimpanzee gestures overlap extensively in meaning
title_full Bonobo and chimpanzee gestures overlap extensively in meaning
title_fullStr Bonobo and chimpanzee gestures overlap extensively in meaning
title_full_unstemmed Bonobo and chimpanzee gestures overlap extensively in meaning
title_short Bonobo and chimpanzee gestures overlap extensively in meaning
title_sort bonobo and chimpanzee gestures overlap extensively in meaning
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5828348/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29485994
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2004825
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