Washington: Researchers have claimed that chimpanzees are capable of using gestures to communicate as they pursue specific goals, like finding a hidden piece of food.
Researchers at Georgia State University`s Language Research Center examined how two language-trained chimpanzees communicated with a human experimenter to find food.
The team devised a task that demanded coordination among the chimps and a human to find a piece of food that had been hidden in a large outdoor area.
The human experimenter did not know where the food was hidden, and the chimpanzees used gestures like pointing to guide the experimenter to the food.
Dr. Charles Menzel, a senior research scientist at the Language Research Center, said the design of the experiment with the " chimpanzee-as-director" created new ways to study the primate.
The paper has been published in journal Nature Communications.
