Every Body Communicates! Ape gestures, postures & displays, with Kirsty E. Graham

March 22 2025, 17:00 GMT/ 13:00 EST/ 10:00 PST (5pm GMT/ 1 pm EST/ 10am PST)

Every Body Communicates! Ape gestures, postures & displays

Many species move their bodies in communicative ways, but we are only just beginning to scratch the surface of nonhuman bodily communication. Most research efforts (including Kirsty's) have gone toward describing and understanding the gestures used by our closest relatives, the nonhuman great apes. Based on this research, Kirsty Graham presents new open source video coding and pose estimation tools that could strengthen our ability to compare bodily communication across research groups and study species. They then make the case for a holistic approach to studying bodily communication, including gestures, postures, and displays. By taking these tools and approach beyond great apes, we can build out a phylogeny of bodily communication and hopefully deepen our understanding of how this ability has evolved.

About the speaker

Kirsty E. Graham (they/them) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Hunter College, in the Animal Behavior & Conservation MA program. From 2020-2024, they were a Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews, UK, working with Dr. Cat Hobaiter comparing gestural communication across bonobos, chimpanzees, humans, gorillas, and orangutans. From 2017-2020, they were a Research Associate with Professor Katie Slocombe at the University of York, looking at the development of Joint Attention across humans, chimpanzees, and Sulawesi crested macaques. They are particularly interested in pragmatic and semantic meaning in nonhuman communication.