Teamwork
Collaboration, or teamwork, refers to mutually beneficial behaviour in which two or more individuals work together toward a shared goal from which all participants can profit. While collaborative activities may appear straightforward given that all participants benefit, they present considerable cognitive challenges. Individuals must not only coordinate their actions but sometimes also share information in some way to support coordinated actions.
Coordination and Communication in Chimpanzees
A central strand of our research examines the extent to which chimpanzees are capable of intentional collaboration, and the strategies they employ to facilitate coordination with a partner when working toward a common goal. Our previous work has shown that chimpanzees actively recruit partners when a problem requires collaboration, and that they preferentially select skilful over less skilful partners (Melis, Hare and Tomasello, 2006). They are also capable of coordinating and negotiating over options — for instance, resolving initial disagreements about which of two pulling trays to choose when the trays differ in reward amounts (Melis, Hare and Tomasello, 2009).
We have further found that chimpanzees will help a partner by transferring the tool needed to perform their role in the task (Melis & Tomasello, 2013). Together, these findings suggest that chimpanzees understand the role their partner plays in a collaborative task and can deploy a range of strategies to initiate and sustain the joint activity.
Communication to support coordination
More recently, we have shown that chimpanzees can develop simple but effective communicative strategies to direct a partner to the location of tools needed for collaborative work (Melis & Tomasello, 2019). Pairs of chimpanzees needed tools hidden in one of two boxes: only one partner could see where the tools were, and only the other could open the boxes. Over time, the informed partner learned to indicate the correct box by approaching it and handing over the key, allowing the pair to retrieve the tools and obtain the food together.
Cooperation often depends on understanding what a partner is trying to tell us. Chimpanzees have long struggled to follow human pointing, a finding often taken as evidence that they do not understand cooperative communicative intentions. In a recent study, chimpanzees worked together with a human partner who pointed to where a tool needed to obtain food was hidden. When we called chimpanzees by name and added food grunts while pointing, they found the tool far more often than when we pointed in silence (Melis et al., 2026). This suggests that their difficulties reflect attentional limitations rather than a lack of understanding: chimpanzees can grasp cooperative communicative intentions, as long as their attention is first engaged.
We are now exploring the flexibility and limits of this communicative behaviour across different collaborative contexts, and the theory of mind skills that underlie it.
Chimpanzees recruit a partner to solve a cooperative task.
The communicator (individual in the back) communicates the location of the hidden tools they both need to extract the rewards from the cooperation box (Transparent box on the left), from Melis & Tomasello (2019).
Chimpanzees follow human pointing when it is combined with attention-grabbing cues, such as calling their name and food grunts, from Melis et al. (2026).