Hare & Tomasello, 2004
There is a need to contrast understanding action with understanding
pointing. After all, there are subjects (chimpanzees) who can comprehend
a failed reach but not a pointing action.
How does understanding these actions, the failed reach and the pointing action
differ?
Moll and Tomasello offer a view ...
In this experiment, we contrast failed reaches with pointing ...
Hare and Call (\citeyear{hare_chimpanzees_2004}) contrast pointing with a failed reach
as two ways of indicating which of two closed containers a reward is in. Chimps can
easily interpret a failed reach but are stumped by the point to a closed container.
You are the subjects. This is what you saw (two conditions). Your task was to choose the
container with the reward.
Infants can do this sort of task, it's really easy for them \citep{Behne:2005qh}. (And,
incidentally, they distinguish communicative points from similar but non-communicative
bodily configurations.)
The pictures in the figure stand for what participants, who were chimpanzees, saw.
The question was whether participants would be able to work out which of two containers
concealed a reward.
In the condition depicted in the left panel, participants saw a chimpanzee trying but
failing to reach for the correct container.
Participants had no problem getting the reward in this case, suggesting that they
understood the goal of the failed reach.
In the condition depicted in the right panel, a human pointed at the correct container.
Participants did not get the reward in this case as often as in the failed reach case,
suggesting that they failed to understand the goal of the pointing action.
(Actually the apes were above chance in using the point, just better in the failed reach condition. Hare et al comment ;chimpanzees can learn to exploit a pointing cue with some experience, as established by previous research (Povinelli et al. 1997; Call et al. 1998, 2000), and so by the time they engaged in this condition they had learned to use arm extension as a discriminative cue to the food’s location' \citep[p.\ 578]{hare_chimpanzees_2004}.)%
\footnote{%
The contrast between the two conditions is not due merely to the fact that one involves a human and the other a chimpanzee.
Participants were also successful when the failed reach was executed by a human rather than another chimpanzee \citep[][experiment 1]{hare_chimpanzees_2004}.
}
\textbf{Note that} chimpanzees do follow the point to a container \citep[see][p.\
6]{Moll:2007gu}.
\subsection{pointing vs linguistic communication}
‘the most fundamental aspects of language that make it such a uniquely powerful form
of human cognition and communication---joint attention, reference via perspectives,
reference to absent entities, cooperative motives to help and to share, and other
embodiments of shared intentionality---are already present in the humble act of infant
pointing.’ \citep[p.\ 719]{Tomasello:2007fi}
‘cooperative communication does not depend on language, […] language depends on it.’
\citep[p.\ 720]{Tomasello:2007fi}
‘Pointing may […] represent a key transition, both phylogenetically and
ontogenetically, from nonlinguistic to linguistic forms of human communication.’
\citep[p.\ 720]{Tomasello:2007fi}