Chimpanzees Use Gestures Too

            Gestures are a crucial piece of how we humans communicate with each other every day. Dr. Elizabeth Wakefield’s study Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gestures for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism explores how language proficiency impacts the benefits that comes with the use of gestures in speech in children. The authors found that gestures were most helpful in retaining information when the gestures were used with the children’s non dominate language (Zielinski & Wakefield, 2021). Furthermore, they found that the children divert more of their visual attention to the gestures when the speaker is talking in their non dominate language. An exciting recent discovery in neuroscience is that we humans are not the only species on earth that is enriched by the ability to gesture. Rather, we share the ability with our distant cousins- chimpanzees (Badihi et al., 2024).

            The article Chimps Use Gestures, Like Humans, to Communicate featured on neurosciencenews.com summarizes the recently published study Chimpanzee gestural exchanges share temporal structure with human language by Badihi et al. in Current Biology. In this study they explored over 8,500 gestures from five wild chimpanzee communities (Badihi et al., 2024). Like humans, they found that the chimps heavily rely on gestures to communitive, with 14% of communicative interactions between chimps including an exchange of gestures. Interestingly, their data show that the chimps have similar timing patterns between gesture to humans, with short pauses between gesture and gestural response to be at around 120 ms. These similarities to humans suggest a possible shared evolutionary mechanism for the use of gestures between us and chimps.

            An interesting finding from the Chimpanzee study is that the chimpanzees have different gesture patterns between their chimpanzee communities. This reflects a similar pattern in humans were different languages and cultures come with different paces in conversation. This aspect of the study made me think a lot about Dr. Wakefield’s work as she explored the use of gestures in speech from a language that the speaker is less proficient in. While her 2021 study focuses on how gestures can benefit one and how much visual attention they are diverting to gestures, it is useful to consider how, like the chimps, might gestures vary between languages as this would affect how useful they are. In her study the children were primarily English speakers, with some proficiency in Polish, and they benefited most from the gestures when they were given information in Polish. But for some vastly different language, say a lithographic one, would the gestures vary so much that they would lose the benefit? How different are the chimpanzee gestures from each other and is this similar to how different human gestures are? This article also made me think about the utility of non-human primates in gesture research. I am curious to know if gestures have been seen in more commonly used species in research like Rhesus Macaques.

References

 

Badihi, G., Graham, K. E., Grund, C., Safryghin, A., Soldati, A., Donnellan, E., Hashimoto, C., Mine, J. G., Piel, A. K., Stewart, F., Slocombe, K. E., Wilke, C., Townsend, S. W., Zuberbühler, K., Zulberti, C., & Hobaiter, C. (2024). Chimpanzee gestural exchanges share temporal structure with human language. Current Biology, 34(14), R673-R674.

 

Benke, K. (2024, July 22). Chimps use gestures, like humans, to communicate. Neuroscience News. https://neurosciencenews.com/chimps-communication-gestures-evolution-26473/

 

Zielinski, N., & Wakefield, E. M. (2021). Language proficiency impacts the benefits of co-speech gesture for narrative understanding through a visual attention mechanism. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 43, No. 43).