Chimpanzee Coordination and Potential Communication in a Two-touchscreen Turn-taking Game

Abstract

Recent years have seen a growing interest in the question of whether and how groups of nonhumanprimates coordinate their behaviors for mutual benefit. On the one hand, it has been shown that chimpanzees in the wild and in captivity can solve various coordination problems. on the other hand, evidence of communication in the context of coordination problems is scarce. Here, we investigated how pairs of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) solved a problem of dynamically coordinating their actions for achieving a joint goal. We presented five pairs of chimpanzees with a turn-taking coordination game, where the task was to send a virtual target from one computer display to another using two touch-screens. During the joint practice of the game some subjects exhibited spontaneous gesturing. to address the question whether these gestures were produced to sustain coordination, we introduced a joint test condition in which we simulated a coordination break-down scenario: subjects appeared either unwilling or unable to return the target to their partner. The frequency of gesturing was significantly higher in these test trials than in the regular trials. our results suggest that at least in some contexts chimpanzees can exhibit communicative behaviors to sustain coordination in joint action.Joint coordinated action constitutes a prominent and distinctive aspect of social cognition. The ability to coordinate joint actions through communicative means has been available to human groups and, hypothetically, was available to its immediate ancestors from Homo genus 1-3 . By coordinating their actions individuals can achieve things they would never be able to achieve alone. In this way joint actions are a major building block of human culture 4 . Therefore, it is a crucial question which precursors of joint action coordination are already present in other species and which joint action skills (if any) are only present in humans. In the present study we investigated the joint action coordination abilities and their social-cognitive underpinnings in one of our closest phylogenetic relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).Chimpanzees in their natural habitats constantly face coordination and cooperation problems, such as hunting together 5-9 , teaming up with others during conflicts 10,11 or simply traveling together 12,13 . Several experimental studies in captivity have demonstrated that chimpanzees can solve various coordination problems 14-20 . Common to these experimental studies is the finding that chimpanzees either don't use communication to coordinate 18,21 , or that communication for coordination is rare 14,15 . Although recently Melis & Tomasello 22 reported that pairs of chimpanzees established a successful coordination by communication, they did not observe any gestures between partners. Instead, information about the tool location was primarily transferred by the informed individual approaching the target box. Thus, it is unclear whether chimpanzees were communicating or whether the uninformed partner used the position of her p...

Progress in Joint-Action Research

“…Fundamental questions that arise in relation to comparative research is which human abilities to perform joint actions are shared with other species and what their evolutionary roots may be. Joint action abilities in great apes, our evolutionary ancestors, may have driven the evolution of communication as a way to achieve enhanced abilities to pursue joint action goals (Voinov et al, 2020).…”

Chimpanzees communicate to coordinate a cultural practice

“…Chimpanzees cooperate (Mitani, 2009), but not much is known about the ways in which they coordinate their joint efforts. In experimental settings, some chimpanzees used location enhancing behaviors (e.g., bodily positioning, touching, peering) (Melis and Tomasello, 2019), or generic gestures (e.g., arm fling, clapping, banging on panels; Voinov et al 2020) to entice their conspecific partners into a joint action. In natural contexts, chimpanzees and bonobos communicate to coordinate joint actions like joint travel (Fröhlich et al, 2016) and social play (Heesen et al, 2017;Hobaiter and Byrne, 2014), yet "… the degree to which these actions are joint in terms of whether or not partners aim to achieve shared goals together, or whether partners have shared intentions, remains unknown."…”

When and how do non-human great apes communicate to support cooperation?

“…Although there are more studies examining cooperation and coordination abilities in great apes, our focus here is only in those studies that either report or specifically investigated communication aimed at coordination with the partner. scenario Crawford [44] juvenile chimpanzees Menzel [45] chimpanzees: adult male-female infant Chalmeau [46] mother-offspring orangutans Völter et al [47] chimpanzees: adult male-male juveniles Schweinfurth et al [48] attention-getters between conspecifics (distal set-up) various pairs of unrelated chimpanzees Voinov et al [49] vocalizations and tactile recruitment of human partner (partners in the same space) young female chimpanzee-human experimenter…”

“…Future studies should investigate this possibility in more detail. More recently, Voinov et al [49] also introduced a coordination breakdown scenario and found gestural communication among chimpanzees interacting in a two-touchscreen turn-taking game. In this task, chimpanzees are required to send a virtual target from one screen to another using two touch screens for mutual benefit.…”

“…[ 48 ] attention-getters between conspecifics (distal set-up) various pairs of unrelated chimpanzees Voinov et al . [ 49 ] vocalizations and tactile recruitment of human partner (partners in the same space) young female chimpanzee–human experimenter Hirata & Fuwa [ 50 ] Hirata, Morimura and Fuwa [ 51 ] no communication chimpanzee–human (caregiver) Warneken et al . [ 52 ] various pairs of unrelated chimpanzees Povinelli & O'Neil [ 53 ] asymmetrical attention partner's attention directed somewhere else attention-getters at the desired location (distal set-up) various pairs of unrelated chimpanzees Bullinger et al [ 54 ] Bullinger et al .…”