1 Animal Communication Overview Federico Rossano and Stephan P. Kaufhold For one reason or another, you have decided to pick up this book. Assuming that you are reading the printed words and understand English, your motiv- ation to do so is likely to acquire information about the topic displayed on the cover: animal cognition. If you want to show this chapter to your pet, they might perceive similar visual stimuli – black symbols on a white page – however, they will not extract the same information as you can. Many human societies have developed writing as a cultural tool that allows transmitting linguistic information beyond the present to a theoretically unlimited number of individuals who are able to read the content. Acquiring the skills necessary for reading and writing is a time-consuming process, and does not come easily to us; mastering this practice takes many years. On an evolutionary scale, representing language through written symbols is a relatively recent invention, and still accounts for only a fraction of the information that we communicate with each other. Notably, our ability to read written symbols relies on cortical areas of the brain that have evolved for object and face visual recognition and clearly not for reading per se (see e.g., Dehaene & Cohen, 2011). Spoken language, in contrast, is not only considerably older, but also a human universal and commonly listed as one of the defining abilities of our species. Language enables us to flexibly communicate feelings and ideas with innumer- able degrees of freedom. While a communication system as complex as language might be unique to our species, the transfer of information between organisms is a common phenomenon in biology. The study of communication across the phylogenetic tree can not only help to better understand how human language has evolved but is also central to understanding living organisms in general. Depending on the definition, communication is not limited to animal species, but can be found across a wide spectrum of species, such as bacteria and plants. Even communication between different biological kingdoms can be commonly found, and is the subject of a rich body of research literature, for example plant–animal communication (e.g., Schaefer & Ruxton, 2011). This is, however, beyond the scope of this chapter, which will rather provide a brief summary of concepts, approaches, and issues related to the study of communication between animals. It is important to note that animal communication, like every other bio- logical phenomenon, can be addressed on multiple levels. The most common 5 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108564113.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press