ArticleCommunications biology2021
Multicomponent and multisensory communicative acts in orang-utans may serve different functions.
Article in Communications biology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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16 citing papers in PubMed, 22 citations in OpenAlex.
- Hallmarks of social action in the vocal turn-taking of wild common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus).Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Assessing flexibility in meaning and context in non-human communication.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Flexible use of multimodal communicative strategies in adult chimpanzees.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Versatile use of chimpanzee call combinations promotes meaning expansion.Science advances · 2025Article
- The development of social attention in orangutans: Comparing peering behavior in wild and zoo-housed individuals.iScience · 2025Article
- Young sanctuary-living chimpanzees produce more communicative expressions with artificial objects than with natural objects.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Wild and captive immature orangutans differ in their non-vocal communication with others, but not with their mothers.Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2024Article
- Social uncertainty promotes signal complexity during approaches in wild chimpanzees (Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Production of multimodal signals to assert social dominance in white-lipped peccary (Tayassu pecari).PloS one · 2023Article
- Social tolerance and interactional opportunities as drivers of gestural redoings in orang-utans.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Great ape communication as contextual social inference: a computational modelling perspective.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Revisiting the human 'interaction engine': comparative approaches to social action coordination.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Visual bodily signals as core devices for coordinating minds in interaction.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Individual variation and plasticity in the infant-directed communication of orang-utan mothers.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Orangutans have larger gestural repertoires in captivity than in the wild-A case of weak innovation?iScience · 2021Article
- Multicomponent and multisensory communicative acts in orang-utans may serve different functions.Communications biology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
From early infancy, human face-to-face communication is multimodal, comprising a plethora of interlinked communicative and sensory modalities. Although there is also growing evidence for this in nonhuman primates, previous research rarely disentangled production from perception of signals. Consequently, the functions of integrating articulators (i.e. production organs involved in multicomponent acts) and sensory channels (i.e. modalities involved in multisensory acts) remain poorly understood. Here, we studied close-range social interactions within and beyond mother-infant pairs of Bornean and Sumatran orang-utans living in wild and captive settings, to examine use of and responses to multicomponent and multisensory communication. From the perspective of production, results showed that multicomponent acts were used more than the respective unicomponent acts when the presumed goal did not match the dominant outcome for a specific communicative act, and were more common among non-mother-infant dyads and Sumatran orang-utans. From the perception perspective, we found that multisensory acts were more effective than the respective unisensory acts, and were used more in wild compared to captive populations. We argue that multisensory acts primarily facilitate effectiveness, whereas multicomponent acts become relevant when interaction outcomes are less predictable. These different functions underscore the importance of distinguishing between production and perception in studies of communication.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.