Communication

This chapter reviews what has been learned about animal thinking from the study of animal communication, and considers what we might hope to learn in the future. It begins with a discussion on the importance of informational versus non-informational interpretations of animal communication and then considers what inferences can be drawn about the cognitive requirements of communication from the communicative abilities of simple organisms. Next, it discusses the importance of context to the meaning of animal signals and the possibility of asymmetries in the neural processes underlying production versus reception. Current theories on the evolution of human language are reviewed and how the study of animal communication informs these theories.