ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2022
Great ape communication as contextual social inference: a computational modelling perspective.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- EVApeCognition: An 18-Year Dataset of Great Ape Cognition.Scientific data · 2026Article
- Assessing flexibility in meaning and context in non-human communication.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- The gestural repertoire of Bwindi mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei): gesture form and frequency of use.Animal cognition · 2025Article
- The origin of great ape gestural forms.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Pragmatics as Social Inference About Intentional Action.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Overcoming bias in the comparison of human language and animal communication.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- The interaction engine: cuteness selection and the evolution of the interactional base for language.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Revisiting the human 'interaction engine': comparative approaches to social action coordination.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Interaction and ostension: the myth of 4th-order intentionality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
Human communication has been described as a contextual social inference process. Research into great ape communication has been inspired by this view to look for the evolutionary roots of the social, cognitive and interactional processes involved in human communication. This approach has been highly productive, yet it is partly compromised by the widespread focus on how great apes use and understand individual signals. This paper introduces a computational model that formalizes great ape communication as a multi-faceted social inference process that integrates (a) information contained in the signals that make up an utterance, (b) the relationship between communicative partners and (c) the social context. This model makes accurate qualitative and quantitative predictions about real-world communicative interactions between semi-wild-living chimpanzees. When enriched with a pragmatic reasoning process, the model explains repeatedly reported differences between humans and great apes in the interpretation of ambiguous signals (e.g. pointing or iconic gestures). This approach has direct implications for observational and experimental studies of great ape communication and provides a new tool for theorizing about the evolution of uniquely human communication. This article is part of the theme issue 'Revisiting the human 'interaction engine': comparative approaches to social action coordination'.
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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.