Pointing: Culture, Development, and Evolution

Pointing is a fundamental gesture that connects individuals with their social and physical worlds. Whether communicating information about the external environment or serving to clarify to whom or what someone is referring, pointing may appear to be a uniquely human and universal action. However, it develops in varied social and cultural contexts, and even some nonhuman species point and can understand pointing cues. While there has been substantial research on the cultural, developmental, and evolutionary aspects of pointing, these perspectives remain fragmented. This book bridges this gap by bringing together leading scholars from cognitive psychology, evolutionary anthropology and biology, animal behavior, developmental psychology, and comparative psychology to synthesize current findings, highlight emerging directions, and provide students and researchers with a comprehensive view of the field.

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.