Marie Bourjade

Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès - CLLE UMR 5263 · Psychology

Gaze behaviour, notably the alternation of gaze between distal objects and social partners that accompanies primates' gestural communication is considered a standard indicator of intentionality. However, the developmental precursors of gaze behaviour in primates' communication are not well understood. Here, we capitalized on the training in gesture...

Non-human animals, including great apes, have been suggested to share some of the skills for planning that humans commonly exhibit. A crucial difference between human and non-human planning may relate to the diversity of domains and needs in which this skill is expressed. Although great apes can save tools for future use, there is little evidence y...

Although nonhuman primates' gestural communication is often considered to be a likely precursor of human language, the intentional properties in this communicative system have not yet been entirely elucidated. In particular, little is known about the intentional nature of monkeys' gestural signalling and related social understanding. We investigate...

Whether or not non-human animals can plan for the future is a hotly debated issue. We investigate this question further and use a planning-to-exchange task to study future planning in the cooperative domain in two species of monkeys: the brown capuchin (Cebus apella) and the Tonkean macaque (Macaca tonkeana). The rationale required subjects to plan...

Play remains a mystery and adult play even more so. More typical of young stages in healthy individuals, it occurs rarely at adult stages but then more often in captive/domestic animals, which can imply spatial, social and/or feeding deprivations or restrictions that are challenging to welfare, than in animals living in natural conditions. Here, we...

Gestural communication permeates all domains of chimpanzees' social life and is intentional in use. However, we still have only limited information on how young apes develop the sociocognitive skills needed for intentional communication. In this cross-sectional study, we document the development of behavioral adjustment to the recipient's visual at...

Cooperation plays a key role in the development of advanced societies and can be stabilized through shared genes (kinship) or reciprocation. In humans, cooperation among kin occurs more readily than cooperation among non-kin. In many organisms, cooperation can shift with age (e.g. helpers at the nest); however, little is known about developmental s...

Growing scientific fields often involve multidisciplinary investigations in which the same concepts may have different meanings. Here, we examine the case of ‘gesture’ in comparative research to depict how conceptual diversity hidden by the label ‘gesture’ can lead to consistently divergent interpretations in humans and nonhuman primates. We show t...

Cooperation plays a key role in advanced societies with human cooperation among kin being more prominent than cooperation among non-kin. However, little is known about the developmental roots of kin and non-kin cooperation in humans. Here, we show for the first time that children cooperated less successfully with siblings than with non-kin children...

Gesturing is a widespread phenomenon in the animal kingdom, as well as an important facet of human language. As such, studying the communicative gestures of our close phylogenetic relatives is essential to better understand its evolution. While recent studies have shown that ape gestural communication shares some properties with human language, ver...

Joint attention is a core ability of human social cognition which broadly refers to the coordination of attention with both the presence and activity of social partners. In both human and non-human primates, joint attention can be assessed from behaviour; gestures and gaze alternation between the partner and a distal object are standard behavioural...

Two methodologies have traditionally been used to measure hemispheric specialization for perception and expression of emotions in human and nonhuman primates. The first refers to objective measures, that is, measures of area and length of facial features, and the second concerns subjective "measures," that is, assessment of chimeric faces by human...

Reading the attentional state of an audience is crucial for effective intentional communication. This study investigates how individual learning experience affects subsequent ability to tailor gestural communication to audience visual attention. Olive baboons were atypically trained to request food with gestures by a human standing in profile, whil...

Two methodologies have traditionally been used to measure hemispheric specialization for perception and expression of emotions in human and nonhuman primates. The first refers to objective measures, that is, measures of area and length of facial features, and the second concerns subjective “measures,” that is, assessment of chimeric faces by human...

Social attention refers to the orientation of individuals' activity towards social stimuli, and operates both as a selective perception of those stimuli and as a priming for action. The two main acceptances of the concept are, for individuals A and B: (1) A pays attention to any feature of B, and (2) A specifically attends to B's direction of atten...

Pointing gestures have been intensively studied by psychologists in both human and non-human primates. Research usually focusses on the emergence of pointing during ontogeny and phylogeny because infants develop pointing before speaking and non-human primates use pointing or “point-like gestures” while they do not (yet) speak. However, pointing in...

Yawning is rare in herbivores which therefore may be an interesting group to disentangle the potential function(s) of yawning behaviour. Horses provide the opportunity to compare not only animals living in different conditions but also wild versus domestic species. Here, we tested three hypotheses by observing both domestic and Przewalski horses li...

Background: In developmental research, infants are commonly assumed to be early stakeholders in interactions with their caregivers. The tools that infants can use to interact with others vary from visual contact to smiling or vocalizing, and also include motor activity. However, surprisingly few studies have explored how the nature and context of...

Leadership is commonly invoked when accounting for the coordination of group movements in animals, yet it remains loosely defined. In parallel, there is increased evidence of the sharing of group decisions by animals on the move. How leadership integrates within this recent framework on collective decision-making is unclear. Here, we question the o...

S’adresser à un partenaire attentif est un des pré-requis de la communication intentionnelle. Dans une situation expérimentale de quémande alimentaire, les primates non humains sont généralement capable d’ajuster leur communication gestuelle à l’état d’attention visuelle d’un humain. Toutefois, la reconnaissance des indices posturaux d’attention in...

Le comportement des primates et les bases cerebrales qui le sous-tendent font preuve d’une grande plasticite sous l’influence de contraintes specifiques liees a un environnement tenu comme imprevisible dans le temps et dans l’espace. Ainsi, pour mieux comprendre les primates, il nous parait important de considerer a la fois leur comportement en mil...

Olive baboons (Papio anubis) do acquire and use intentional requesting gestures in experimental contexts. Individual's hand preference for these gestures is consistent with that observed for typical communicative gestures, but not for manipulative actions. Here, we examine whether the strength of hand preference may also be a good marker of hemisph...

Olive baboons (Papio anubis) do acquire and use intentional requesting gestures in experimental contexts. Individual’s hand preference for these gestures is consistent with that observed for typical communicative gestures, but not for manipulative actions. Here, we examine whether the strength of hand preference may also be a good marker of hemisph...

Although gestural communication is widespread in primates, few studies focused on the cognitive processes underlying gestures produced by monkeys. The present study asked whether red-capped mangabeys (Cercocebus torquatus) trained to produce visually based requesting gestures modify their gestural behavior in response to human's attentional states....

Chipse, an adult female red-capped mangabey, produces requesting gestures by extending an arm through the cage mesh toward an experimenter who holds a raisin in her hands. The experimenter displays five experimental conditions in succession in which her attentional state differs on the basis of gaze (Eyes Open, Eyes Distracted, and Eyes Closed) hea...

Horses are highly social animals that have evolved to live in social groups. However, in modern husbandry systems, single housing prevails where horses experience social isolation, a challenge-to-welfare factor. One major reason for this single housing is the owners’ concerns that horses may injure each other during aggressive encounters. However,...

No abstract needed for the special issue: Group leadership.

We addressed decision-making processes in the collective movements of two groups of Przewalski horses (Equus ferus przewalskii) living in a semi free-ranging population. We investigated whether different patterns of group movement are related to certain ecological contexts (habitat use and group activity) and analysed the possible decision-making p...

Adult male dominance rank correlates with reproductive success in many mammalian species. Whether and how rank in immature males affects the number of offspring fathered later in life has rarely been inves-tigated. Moreover, age, size and fighting skills all qualify as major intrin-sic factors influencing rank, particularly in sexually dimorphic sp...

Adults play an important role in regulating the social behaviour of young individuals. However, a few pioneer studies suggest that, more than the mere presence of adults, their proportions in social groups affect the social development of young. Here, we hypothesized that aggression rates and social cohesion were correlated to adult-young ratios. O...

Adult male dominance rank correlates with reproductive success in many mammalian species. Whether and how rank in immature males affects the number of offspring fathered later in life has rarely been investigated. Moreover, age, size and fighting skills all qualify as major intrinsic factors influencing rank, particularly in sexually dimorphic spec...

We investigated the effects of the introduction of foreign adults on the behavior of young horses. First, we observed the behavior of 1- and 2-year-old domestic horses housed in same-age and same-sex groups (a standard housing system, but different from a natural situation). Then, two same-sex adults were introduced into each experimental group. Ob...

European starlings are well known for their rich and varied social life. Recent studies reveal a social organization based on same-sex preferences, spatial proximity and vocal sharing in captive groups. Much less is known about social cognition and the possible role of social experience on the development of cognitive abilities. Experimental result...