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Humans could identify the meaning of gestures “more than 50% of the time”. That’s really not a high bar to reach, especially as you’d expect most gestures to in
by simonh 4y ago
Humans could identify the meaning of gestures “more than 50% of the time”. That’s really not a high bar to reach, especially as you’d expect most gestures to involve the parts of the body, or mimic the action the gesture is about.
Furthermore plenty of animals have display or signalling behaviours, and we can often figure out what those mean. Ancestral memory of some kind really seems a stretch.
If we could identify even non obvious gestures maybe 90+% of the time, that might require a better explanation than just figuring it out, but if it was that high I suspect the article would have said so.
- jvanderbot 4y agoIn the space of interpretation, there's a huge number of possibilities. 50% might be a huge outlier.
- ummonk 4y agoActually only 4 possibilities in the provided quiz - it's multiple choice.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- labster 4y agoDid you read the study, or just assume all multiple choice questions have four options? I couldn’t tell the number of choices from the article.
- ummonk 4y agoThe study says "four possible meaning answers", but more importantly the article links to the quiz used in the study itself: https://research.sc/participant/login/dynamic/505CF355-CEF5-44ED-B2F1-2CBA484BD2FA https://research.sc/participant/login/dynamic/505CF355-CEF5-...
- mc32 4y agoI bet pet owners can guess pet gestures as well. On the other hand human gestures don’t always translate from one culture to another; what does that mean?
- simonh 4y agoIt means that our range of linguistic expression is several orders of magnitude greater and more complex than that of apes. Still when we don’t share a spoken language we fall back on gestures.
- FartyMcFarter 4y agoLots of dog owners are bad at reading their dog's body language. For example, if your dog licks their lips, they're usually trying to calm down the situation (e.g. telling you to stop annoying them), but lots of people don't know this. There are other calming signals, such as the dog closing and opening their eyes (slower than blinking). You can use this on your dog and they might understand it :)
- krageon 4y agoLots of dog owners are bad at it, but they can probably hit the right thing 50% of the time. Without any sort of successful communication, I can't imagine it would be pleasant to own a pet.
- int_19h 4y agoPets adapt to humans, as well, so it's not a clean comparison. In my experience with cats, for example, the ones who were regularly "spoken" to (by responding to their meeps) tend to develop a richer gamut of vocalizations which they use to be more specific about what they want. But it's not really "cat language" - it's language that cats develop specifically for humans.