Humans are social animals but so are many other animals. Yet humans appear to be more cooperative with each other and spend significant more time interacting with each other than other great apes for example. So what is special about human social interaction and how similar or different is it from other animals? In recent years there has been a surge in interest in animal behavior and communication, with projects receiving hundreds of millions of dollars to study for example whale songs or bioacoustics with the intrinsic assumption that AI will soon allow us to decode animal communicative signals. Yet an exclusive focus on auditory signals, mutuated from a focus on language for LLM training, limits our true understanding of how animals communicate. Beside the need for a multimodal perspective, it is also apparent that the structure and timing of social interaction between non-human animals might be different from human social interactions. And yet, since interspecies communication does occur, e.g. when we interact with our pets at home, it must be possible to identify some meaningful overlapping levels of order. 

In this seminar we will explore how different animal species communicate and what is similar and different between human communication and other animals' ways of communicating. We will review different types of animal signaling, the informative vs. manipulative functions of communication, when and why non-human animals communicate, and discuss how rare are the vocal learning abilities of humans in the animal kingdom. While presenting examples from several animal species (primates, ravens, bees, dolphins, dogs and cats) we will introduce a stepwise procedure to begin cracking the code of animal behavior and communication by adopting a conversation analytic perspective. 

Participants are invited to bring along short clips of either humans interacting with a non-human animal or interactions between 2 or more members of the same species (e.g. 2 or more dogs, 2 or more chimpanzees, 2 or more seals) to be used as a testbed for what they have learned in the workshop. It is completely acceptable to bring along social media clips that participants find particularly compelling or puzzling.
 

Facilitated by: Federico Rossano