Very short training protocol for understanding referential cues in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).

Abstract

Central to many contemporary theories of language development is the idea that humans possess species-specific cognitive adaptations for understanding directional social cues, whereas contrasting theoretical positions emphasize the influence of domain-general learning mechanisms on this comprehension. We sought to test whether presumptive domain-general learning was sufficient to instill the comprehension of pointing and other cues by asking just how much training is required to train 44 mature, captive chimpanzees to follow deictic cues, using both a complex set of social cues (pointing, head/body orientation, and verbal cue) and a nonsocial cue (an object adjacency). We found that successful performance on an object choice task-a commonly used measure of receptive joint attention capacity-required relatively little explicit training. Thus, if chimpanzees can acquire this understanding with relatively little experience, humans may also acquire receptive joint attention from their learning experiences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).