Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Foreword, by Louis J. Moses
- Acknowledgments
- Note added in proof
- Part I Comparative and Developmental Approaches to Self-awareness
- Part II The Development of Self in Human Infants and Children
- Part III Self-awareness in Great Apes
- 11 Social and cognitive factors in chimpanzee and gorilla mirror behavior and self-recognition
- 12 The comparative and developmental study of self-recognition and imitation: The importance of social factors
- 13 Shadows and mirrors: Alternative avenues to the development of self-recognition in chimpanzees
- 14 Symbolic representation of possession in a chimpanzee
- 15 Self-awareness in bonobos and chimpanzees: A comparative perspective
- 16 me chantek: The development of self-awareness in a signing orangutan
- 17 Self-recognition and self-awareness in lowland gorillas
- 18 How to create self-recognizing gorillas (but don't try it on macaques)
- 19 Incipient mirror self-recognition in zoo gorillas and chimpanzees
- 20 Do gorillas recognize themselves on television?
- Part IV Mirrors and Monkeys, Dolphins, and Pigeons
- Part V Epilogue
- Author index
- Subject index
16 - me chantek: The development of self-awareness in a signing orangutan
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Foreword, by Louis J. Moses
- Acknowledgments
- Note added in proof
- Part I Comparative and Developmental Approaches to Self-awareness
- Part II The Development of Self in Human Infants and Children
- Part III Self-awareness in Great Apes
- 11 Social and cognitive factors in chimpanzee and gorilla mirror behavior and self-recognition
- 12 The comparative and developmental study of self-recognition and imitation: The importance of social factors
- 13 Shadows and mirrors: Alternative avenues to the development of self-recognition in chimpanzees
- 14 Symbolic representation of possession in a chimpanzee
- 15 Self-awareness in bonobos and chimpanzees: A comparative perspective
- 16 me chantek: The development of self-awareness in a signing orangutan
- 17 Self-recognition and self-awareness in lowland gorillas
- 18 How to create self-recognizing gorillas (but don't try it on macaques)
- 19 Incipient mirror self-recognition in zoo gorillas and chimpanzees
- 20 Do gorillas recognize themselves on television?
- Part IV Mirrors and Monkeys, Dolphins, and Pigeons
- Part V Epilogue
- Author index
- Subject index
Summary
Introduction
The investigation of the linguistic and cognitive abilities of great apes offers insights into self-awareness by providing the additional modality of language with which self-awareness can be investigated in animals (see Patterson & Cohn, SAAH17). In ape language experiments, chimpanzees, gorillas, and an orangutan have been enculturated in human settings and have learned to communicate according to human linguistic and cultural conventions using a set of gestural signs, computer lexigrams, or plastic tokens (Fouts, 1973; Gardner & Gardner, 1969; Miles, 1980,1986; Patterson, 1978; Premack, 1972; Rumbaugh, Gill, & von Glaserfeld, 1973; Savage-Rumbaugh, 1986; Terrace, Petitto, Sanders, & Bever, 1979).
These studies provide several major advantages for investigating selfawareness in animals. First, they permit us to study self-awareness in our closest biological relatives, the great apes, with whom we share a large number of biological and behavioral similarities. A relatively small number of genetic alterations are required to extrapolate humans and all of the great apes from a theoretical common ancestor most like the orangutan (Yunis & Prakash, 1982). The orangutan karyotype is the most conservative (primitive), with humans and the African apes displaying more derived features (Mai, 1983; Schwartz, 1987; Stanyon & Chiarelli, 1982; Weiss, 1987). This interpretation is also supported by fossil data (Pilbeam, 1982). Thus, the orangutan, having the most pleisiomorphic traits of the great apes, is the most primitive and has been termed “a living fossil” (Lewin, 1983).
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- Self-Awareness in Animals and HumansDevelopmental Perspectives, pp. 254 - 272Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994
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