[BERG] Dinner following Cat Hobaiter's seminar on Thursday

[Hannah Buchanan-Smith]

Aopologies for cross postings....


Would anyone like to join us for dinner after Cat Hobaiter's seminar on Thursday, 13th February, at 4pm in the Psychology Common Room 3A94.

Please let me know by Wednesday noon so I can book a table. We are thinking of Smiling Jacks (dinner usually < £12/head).  http://www.smiling-jacks.co.uk/

Best, Hannah

Gesture in the Chimpanzees of Budongo and Beyond: Current Research and New Directions.

Great apes employ a rich repertoire of gestures in intentional communication. I will describe the gesturing of the wild chimpanzees of the Budongo forest, Uganda, discussing the evidence that they are used intentionally by individuals of all ages, across a range of contexts, including 'evolutionarily urgent' ones. I will examine possible reasons for their combination into sequences, including any evidence for persistence towards a goal, or syntactic-like structures. I will then address the big question: what does it all mean? I will describe how we can try to study meaning in the communication of another species, whether individual gesture forms can be said to have specific meanings, and, if so, whether these are consistent across signallers. I will discuss whether or not the high levels of flexibility regularly reported in previous captive studies remains valid in the light of evidence from a wild population, and to what extent any flexible use involves the use of several gesture forms for a single meaning, or a single gesture form for several meanings. I will end with a brief introduction to our most recent research: (i) comparing gesturing in East and West African chimpanzees, and (ii) exploring beyond gesture into multimodal communication. Is multimodal communication simply redundant repetition of the same message in different channels? Or could it provide the opportunity to refine or modify the communication?


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