Animal pointing: Changing trends and findings from 30 years of research.

Abstract

The past 30 years have witnessed a continued and growing interest in the production and comprehension of manual pointing gestures in nonhuman animals. Captive primates with diverse rearing histories have shown evidence of both pointing production and comprehension, though there certainly are individual and species differences, as well as substantive critiques of how to interpret pointing or "pointing-like" gestures in animals. Early literature primarily addressed basic questions about whether captive apes poin…