Guest Lecture: Julia Fischer (Göttingen)
Please note: If you would like to attend the lecture, please register:
reciprocity2015@gmail.com
Symposium website Reciprocity and social cognition (internal link)
Abstract: Recent years have seen a revival of the debate whether animal signals bear linguistic characteristics, or whether Darwin was in fact correct when he proposed that animal signals are largely expressions of emotions. Highly context specific signals, such as alarm calls, were (and are continued to be) taken as evidence that animals, specifically nonhuman primates, possess precursors to language. I will present the results of a detailed acoustic analysis of a classic example in this debate, the alarm calls of vervet monkeys. Although the three main alarm calls given in response to eagles, leopards and snakes are acoustically distinct, a broader analysis showed that calls given in agonistic encounters are highly similar to eagle and snake alarms, questioning the notion of context-specificity. I will argue that the vocal production of nonhuman primates bears little resemblance to the symbolic and combinatorial features of human speech, despite the fact that signals may be used somewhat flexibly. However, evidence is accumulating that listeners are able to integrate information from multiple sources, including signal and context, and I will present results from playback experiments that tap into the question how monkeys integrate information from different sources to make predictions about ongoing events. Finally, I will consider how communicative behavior is linked to an understanding of other minds. One of the most striking features in nonhuman primate communication is the dichotomy in the flexibility recipients compared to signalers, while human communication is characterized by a “common ground” between signalers and recipients.
Julia Fischer, Cognitive Ethology Lab, German Primate Center
