Elephant multimodal communication
Team: Angela Stoeger, Vesta Eleuteri
Description:
Humans use paralinguistic visual cues, such as facial expressions or gestures, to adjust the meaning of messages. Animals as well communicate using vocalizations, gestures or olfactory cues. Most studies on animal communication so far explored signal modalities separately, yet, communication in many species relies on the combination of these different modalities. Elephants are long-lived, large-brained, social mammals living in a multi-level society, possessing complex cognitive behavior and a rich communicative repertoire of vocalizations and gestures. Signal combinations might, for example, enhance or refine the information transmitted.
The research questions we are interested and currently investigating in elephants are how elephant combine modalities like calls and gestures and what these combinations specifically communicate. In addition, we aim to explore intentionality in elephant gestural communication.
Collaboration partner:
Catherin Hoibater, University of St. Andrews
Lucy Bates, University of Portsmouths
Sam Ferreira, South African National Parks, South Africa
Sean Hensmann, Advantures with Elephants, South Africa
