Chimpanzees: Joint Visual Attention

Gaze following is a behavior that draws the human infant into perceptual contact with objects or events in the world to which others are attending. One interpretation of the development of this phenomenon is that it signals the emergence of joint or shared attention, which may be critical to the development of theory of mind. An alternative interpretation is that gaze following is a noncognitive mechanism that exploits social stimuli in order to orient the infant (or adult) to important events in the world. We report experimental results that chimpanzees display the effect in response to both movement of the head and eyes in concert and eye movement alone. Additional tests indicate that chimpanzees appear able to (a) project an imaginary line of sight through invisible space and (b) understand how that line of sight can be impeded by solid, opaque objects. This capacity may have arisen because of its reproductive payoffs in the context of social competition with conspecifics, predation avoidance, or both.