Speaker
Description
Communication is crucial in social relationships, and its complexity is acknowledged to coevolve with social complexity. The social complexity hypothesis for communicative complexity is widely supported, yet there is a lack of clarity around what researchers refer to as ‘communicative complexity’. By illustrating my points with examples from the available literature and my own research, I will first argue that more specific and holistic definitions of communicative complexity are both essential to capture the complexity of communicative systems. First, loose definitions might be responsible for apparent contradictory results across different taxa (e.g., when looking across human and non-human literature). In addition, many studies reduce communicative complexity to a unique proxy in a unique communicative modality, impacting the accuracy of conclusions. Finally, based on these considerations, I further aim to offer a critical and updated overview of current attempts to assess communicative complexity across taxa. An updated integrative perspective on communicative complexity might unlock the door to a better understanding of the mechanisms behind the observed co-evolution of sociality and communication.
