Erratum to: Do captive mandrills invent new gestures?

How to Invent Functions

The paper presents the abstraction transformation which is a fundamental method for creating functions in ADATE. The use of abstraction turns out to be similar to evolution by gene duplication which is emerging as the most important theory of \building blocks" in natural genomes. We discuss the relationship between abstraction and its natural counterparts, but also give novel technical details ...

Sternal Gland Scent-Marking Signals Sex, Age, Rank, and Group Identity in Captive Mandrills.

Mandrills are one of the few Old World primates to show scent-marking. We combined ethological and chemical approaches to improve our understanding of this behavior in 3 zoo-managed groups. We observed the olfactory behavior performed by adults and adolescents (N = 39) for 775h. We investigated the volatile components of sternal scent-marks using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and compare...

Do conversational hand gestures communicate?

In 5 experiments, male and female undergraduates viewed gestures and tried to select the words that originally accompanied them; read interpretations of gestures' meanings and tried to select the words that originally had accompanied them; tried to recognize gestures they previously had seen, presented either with or without the accompanying speech; and assigned gestures and the accompanying sp...

Managing depression in general practice in Pakistan: do we need to re-invent the wheel?

Do gestures serve an interpersonal function?

Some researchers argue that gestures serve an interpersonal function, such as making the intended message clear (e.g., Gallagher & Frith, 2003; cf. Kita, 2000). In this study, we tested whether gestures serve an interpersonal function, specifically predicting that the higher participants’ autism spectrum quotient, the less frequently they would gesture. Participants completed the Autism Spectru...