Graham Kirsty E, Badihi Gal, Safryghin Alexandra, Grund Charlotte, Hobaiter Catherine
School of Psychology & Neuroscience, University of St Andrews, St Mary's Quad, South St, St Andrews KY16 9JP, Scotland, UK.
Ethol Ecol Evol. 2022 Jan 27;34(3):235-259. doi: 10.1080/03949370.2021.1988722. eCollection 2022.
Over the last 30 years, most research on non-human primate gestural communication has been produced by psychologists, which has shaped the questions asked and the methods used. These researchers have drawn on concepts from philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, and ethology, but despite these broad influences the field has neglected to situate gestures into the socio-ecological context in which the diverse species, individuals, and social-units exist. In this review, we present current knowledge about great ape gestural communication in terms of repertoires, meanings, and development. We fold this into a conversation about variation in other types of ape social behaviour to identify areas for future research on variation in gestural communication. Given the large variation in socio-ecological factors across species and social-units (and the individuals within these groups), we may expect to find different preferences for specific gesture types; different needs for communicating specific meanings; and different rates of encountering specific contexts. New tools, such as machine-learning based automated movement tracking, may allow us to uncover potential variation in the speed and form of gesture actions or parts of gesture actions. New multi-group multi-generational datasets provide the opportunity to apply analyses, such as Bayesian modelling, which allows us to examine these rich behavioural landscapes. Together, by expanding our questions and our methods, researchers may finally be able to study great ape gestures from the perspective of the apes themselves and explore what this gestural communication system reveals about apes' thinking and experience of their world.
在过去30年里，关于非人类灵长类动物手势交流的大多数研究都是由心理学家进行的，这塑造了研究问题和所采用的方法。这些研究人员借鉴了哲学、语言学、人类学和动物行为学的概念，但尽管有这些广泛的影响，该领域却忽视了将手势置于不同物种、个体和社会单位所处的社会生态背景中。在这篇综述中，我们从手势库、含义和发展方面介绍了关于大猩猩手势交流的现有知识。我们将此纳入关于其他类型猿类社会行为变异的讨论中，以确定未来关于手势交流变异研究的领域。鉴于不同物种和社会单位（以及这些群体中的个体）的社会生态因素差异很大，我们可能会发现对特定手势类型有不同偏好；传达特定含义有不同需求；遇到特定情境的频率也不同。新工具，如基于机器学习的自动运动跟踪，可能使我们能够发现手势动作或手势动作部分在速度和形式上的潜在差异。新的多群体多代数据集提供了应用分析方法的机会，如贝叶斯建模，这使我们能够审视这些丰富的行为图景。总之，通过扩展我们的问题和方法，研究人员最终或许能够从猿类自身的角度研究大猩猩的手势，并探索这种手势交流系统揭示了猿类对其世界的思考和体验。
