Lombrey Angèle, Luna Martinez Adriana, Dannenmann Nick, Harvati Katerina, Knief Ulrich, Fröhlich Marlen
Paleoanthropology Section, Department of Geosciences, Institute for Archaeological Sciences, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
Development and Evolution of Cognition Research Group, Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Konstanz, Germany.
Sci Rep. 2025 Sep 9;15(1):32384. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-14835-x.
Human communication is remarkable for its flexibility, a trait largely reflected in its multimodal nature and shared to some extent with nonhuman primates. Although individual differences in social behaviour are known to have evolutionary implications, their role in shaping primate communication remains largely unexplored. This study adopts a multimodal framework to partition variation in chimpanzees' use of multicomponent and multisensory communicative strategies into socio-environmental, between-individual, and within-individual sources. Results showed that research setting and signaller's sex affected communicative expression. Importantly, we also detected consistent between-individual differences in both strategies, independent of age, sex, or setting. While only multicomponent signal use was predicted by behavioural context at the population level, individuals varied in how they adjusted to context only in their use of multisensory acts. These findings reveal substantial flexibility in chimpanzee communication, highlighting individual-specific patterns and supporting a gradual evolutionary pathway toward the complexity of human multimodal communication.
人类交流以其灵活性而著称，这一特性在很大程度上体现在其多模态性质上，并且在一定程度上与非人类灵长类动物共有。尽管已知社会行为的个体差异具有进化意义，但其在塑造灵长类动物交流方面的作用在很大程度上仍未得到探索。本研究采用多模态框架，将黑猩猩使用多成分和多感官交流策略的变异划分为社会环境、个体间和个体内来源。结果表明，研究环境和信号发出者的性别会影响交流表达。重要的是，我们还在这两种策略中检测到了一致的个体间差异，且不受年龄、性别或环境的影响。虽然在群体水平上只有多成分信号的使用可由行为背景预测，但个体在根据背景调整交流方式时，仅在多感官行为的使用上存在差异。这些发现揭示了黑猩猩交流中存在的巨大灵活性，突出了个体特异性模式，并支持了朝着人类多模态交流复杂性发展的渐进进化途径。
