Vocalizing in chimpanzees is influenced by social-cognitive processes.

ABSTRACT: Adjusting communication to take into account information available to one's audience is routine in humans but is assumed absent in other animals, representing a recent development on the lineage leading to humans. This assumption may be premature. Recent studies show changes in primate alarm signaling to threats according to the receivers' risk. However, a classic problem in these and other perspective-taking studies is discerning whether signalers understand the receivers' mental states or simply are responding to their behavior. We designed experiments to exclude concurrent reading of the receivers' behavior by simulating receivers using prerecorded calls of other group members. Specifically, we tested whether wild chimpanzees emitted differing signals in response to a snake model when s

SUBMITTER: Crockford C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5687857 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature