Pointing

Mark A. Krause is a professor of psychology at Southern Oregon University. He is co-editor of Evolution of Learning and Memory Mechanisms (Cambridge, 2022) and serves on the editorial boards for Journal of Comparative Psychology and Animal Behavior and Cognition. Mark has published research on chimpanzees, snakes, birds, and humans and began his career studying pointing in chimpanzees. Kim A. Bard is a former president of both the Primate Society of Great Britain and the European Federation for Primatology, and currently holds a Sponsored Affiliate position at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. She has worked combining comparative perspectives with developmental perspectives in the study of chimpanzees, orangutans, and humans for over forty years. Kim is co-editor of Reaching into Thought: The Minds of the Great Apes (Cambridge, 1996), and The Cultural Nature of Attachment: Contextualizing Relationships and Development (2017). David A. Leavens is an Emeritus Reader in Comparative Psychology at the University of Sussex. For the last thirty years, he has studied pointing, pointing comprehension, and other aspects of joint attention in a variety of species, including chimpanzees, humans, dogs, and cats. David currently holds positions on the editorial boards for Animal Cognition and the Journal of Comparative Psychology.

• Contents; List of Figures; List of Tables; List of Contributors; Introduction to Pointing: Culture, Development, and Evolution Mark A. Krause, Kim A. Bard and David A. Leavens; Part I. Culture and Development: 1. Pointing at, talking about, and looking away: patterns of personal deixis in the context of childhood socialisation in Indian families Nandita Chaudhary, Deepa Chawla and Punya Pillai; 2. The design of pointing Kensy Cooperrider; 3. Development of pointing in toddlers: cultural and epistemological perspectives Hélène Cochet; 4. Attention management by deictic gestures and demonstratives: analysis of the wayfinding practices of the Gǀui/Gǁana in the Kalahari Akira Takada; 5. Pointing to dinner participants in deaf and hearing children's and adults' signing and gesturing Aliyah Morgenstern and Stéphanie Caët; 6. The cultural nature of early social communication Zahra Halavani, Srujana Duggirala, Gülce Özker, Yitong Wang and Tanya MacGillivray; 7. Pointing at local knowledge: roaming place references in Gija conversations Caroline de Dear; 8. The role of infant pointing in child-led caregiving: how infants elicit the interactions that shape their development Claire D. Vallotton, Rachel Albert, Yatma Diop and Loria Kim; 9. How infants learn to follow attention from gaze-direction and pointing gestures Gedeon O. Deák and Yueyan Tang; 10. Thoughtless pointing: how the automatic coordination of touch and vision may produce pointing and joint attention Cathal O'Madagain; 11. Socially signaling robotics: a novel way of looking at gaze following and pointing Shoji Itakura; 12. Developmental significance of the human pointing gesture Ulf Liszkowski and Katharina Kaletsch; Part II. Evolution: 13. Pointing in chimpanzees who use American sign language Mary Lee A. Jensvold; 14. Are we missing the point? Reconsidering methods for detecting referential components of ape gestural communication Vesta Eleuteri, Alexandra Safryghin and Catherine Hobaiter; 15. The nature of the point: communication, association, or methodological muddle, with examples Heidi Lyn; 16. Changing the focus: pointing and attention in great Apes Marta Halina and Katja Liebal; 17. The neural foundations of gestural communication in captive chimpanzees William D. Hopkins; 18. Do baboons point? A review of research on gestural communication in a monkey Adrien Megueritchian; 19. Pointing with your nose: do elephants point, and how do we know? Lucy Bates, Richard Byrne and Joyce Poole; 20. Pointing and the object choice task: findings, flaws, and future directions Hannah Clark; 21. The use of human social cues in domestic farm animals Désirée Brucks and Christian Nawroth.

'This excellent edited volume is the first in more than two decades to examine pointing, a rudimentary referential social communication gesture that is foundational for human language development and for human and non-human social cognition. Environmental, contextual, cultural, configurational, and comparative aspects of pointing are examined in depth.' Deborah L. Best, William L. Poteat Professor of Psychology, Emerita, Wake Forest University, USA