14% of chimpanzees take turns with gestures?
Is that what it’s talking about?
I assumed all animals that communicate took turns communicating.
I know a lot of them have call and response, like birds and dogs and… Yeah, they definitely take turns.
Am I misunderstanding the study?
Is it specifically talking about longer conversations rather than one call and one response?
Almost sounds like full duplex communication isn’t a universal and easily implemented brain function. Who’d have thunk.
Yeah, there are a lot of weird assertions in this study. Or at least in this article.
My understanding is that 14% of the time that a chimp made a gesture to another chimp, there was a gesture used as a response. The result of this would be that there are not many long conversations happening with gestures, but like the paper said, they did see one that went on for 7 rounds.
Many animals do use call and response in communication, but long back and forth conversations are quite rare. Whales of some species have especially long back and forth communications. Sometimes, even for over an hour at a time, they will float near the surface and go back and forth, making sounds to each other. There was even a study earlier this year where humans had a 10+ minute back and forth with a humpback whale named “Twain”. The conversation was essentially both sides going back and forth, claiming to be Twain.
Sperm whales also have long, distinct back and forth conversations. They have even been found to have certain types of calls that, when made by the dominant individual, indicate that the conversation is coming to an end. They have not decoded the meanings of their calls yet, but they have very complex structures that resemble human language in many ways. They have small units that are location/tribe dependent(think accents) that are combined into larger units that follow fairly predictable rules.
That’s what I mean; I know there are other animal species that have conversations, and this article is trying to make out that the 14% of chimps who have call-and response that may be more conversational are a new discovery.
And they’re hinging that assumption on one 7 gesture “conversation” out of all of the chimps they studied
Seems like an fundamentally inaccurate non-story.
Scientific paper with some visualizations:
