Video playback experiments have traditionally been used to test language comprehension in non-human primates, but this study reversed the paradigm to assess humans’ abilities to understand the gestures of their closest living relatives for the first time.ĭr Graham said: “All great apes use gestures, but humans are so gestural – using gestures while we speak and sign, learning new gestures, pantomiming etc – that it’s really hard to pick out shared great ape gestures just by observing people. The results suggest that although humans no longer use these gestures, we may have retained an understanding of this ancestral communication system. When the participants were provided with additional information on the context of the communication, it only had a very small effect on success, suggesting that humans can correctly identify ape gesture meanings from the gestures themselves. Asked to select the meaning of the gesture from four possible answers, participants performed significantly better than expected by chance, correctly interpreting the meaning of chimpanzee and bonobo gestures more than 50 per cent of the time. Ī total of 5,500 people took part in the experiment, viewing short videos of the ten most common gestures used by chimpanzees and bonobos. The study is published today (Tuesday 24 January) in open access journal PLOS Biology. People playing an online game correctly identified more than half of the gestures made by chimpanzees and bonobos in a pioneering experiment run by Dr Kirsty Graham and Dr Catherine Hobaiter from the School of Psychology and Neuroscience.
Humans retain an understanding of gestures made by other great apes even though we no longer use them ourselves, according to a new study by researchers at the University of St Andrews.
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