Flexible use of multimodal communicative strategies in adult chimpanzees

Abstract

Abstract Human communication is remarkable for its flexibility, a trait largely reflected in its multimodal nature and shared to some extent with nonhuman primates. Although individual differences in social behaviour are known to have evolutionary implications, their role in shaping primate communication remains largely unexplored. This study adopts a multimodal framework to partition variation in chimpanzees’ use of multicomponent and multisensory communicative strategies into socio-environmental, between-individual, and within-individual sources. Results showed that research setting and signaller’s sex affected communicative expression. Importantly, we also detected consistent between-individual differences in both strategies, independent of age, sex, or setting. While only multicomponent signal use was predicted by behavioural context at the population level, individuals varied in how they adjusted to context only in their use of multisensory acts. These findings reveal substantial flexibility in chimpanzee communication, highlighting individual-specific patterns and supporting a gradual evolutionary pathway toward the complexity of human multimodal communication.