12/15/2023 0 Comments Funny chimpanzeeMuch of the debate over gaze following comes from disagreement about whether other species are capable of understanding mental states at all, with the largest focus being on primates ( Cheney and Seyfarth 1990 Heyes 1998 Povinelli 2003). This knowledge of “seeing” would then allow the species to understand another’s current mental state and to predict the other’s future behavior based on this mental state. Finally, it is also possible that some species, like humans, come to understand that the direction of another’s eyes determines what he or she does and does not see. Again, this type of learning would not require any real cognitive understanding of eye gaze as a signal of attention in another individual. Alternatively, some species may learn to follow eye gaze over the course of development as they learn that doing so can lead to interesting discoveries. The tendency to follow the eye gaze of another individual may be instinctual, with other species having virtually no understanding of what eye gaze signifies. However, despite the evidence that other species can follow eye gaze, there is much debate about what, if any, cognitive understanding these other species have about the importance of eye gaze in attention. 2005 Povinelli and Eddy 1996a Tomasello et al. Indeed, humans are not alone in their ability to follow others’ eye gaze rather, it is a skill shared by other species including dogs ( Hare and Tomasello 1999, but see Agnetta et al. For humans, the ability to follow another’s gaze and determine what he or she can and cannot see is an important part of developing successful communication skills.Īs a building block to communication, the ability to reliably detect what others are attending to would seem to be useful for any social species, not just humans. By 18 months, children are able to successfully pair a verbally uttered label with the object that the adult was visually attending to at the time of labeling ( Baldwin and Moses 1994). For example, children as young as 1 year of age begin to use pointing gestures to direct the gaze of adults, and carefully monitor the gaze direction of an adult ( Franco and Butterworth 1996). This understanding that another’s eyes signal what he or she is attending to is particularly important for the development of communication. By age two, children will not turn to look in the direction an adult’s head has turned if the adult’s eyes are closed or occluded ( Brooks and Meltzoff 2003). By age one, infants will reliably follow the gaze of their mother ( Butterworth and Jarrett 1991). From early in life, humans understand that the direction of someone’s eyes is an important indication of what is being attended to.
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