Reliance on head versus eyes in the gaze following of great apes and human infants: the cooperative eye hypothesis

Michael Tomasello*, Brian Hare, Hagen Lehmann, Josep Call

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

As compared with other primates, humans have especially visible eyes (e.g., white sclera). One hypothesis is that this feature of human eyes evolved to make it easier for conspecifics to follow an individual's gaze direction in close-range joint attentional and communicative interactions, which would seem to imply especially cooperative (mututalistic) conspecifics. In the current study, we tested one aspect of this cooperative eye hypothesis by comparing the gaze following behavior of great apes to that of human infants. A human experimenter "looked" to the ceiling either with his eyes only, head only (eyes closed), both head and eyes, or neither. Great apes followed gaze to the ceiling based mainly on the human's head direction (although eye direction played some role as well). In contrast, human infants relied almost exclusively on eye direction in these same situations. These results demonstrate that humans are especially reliant on eyes in gaze following situations, and thus, suggest that eyes evolved a new social function in human evolution, most likely to support cooperative (mututalistic) social interactions. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)314-320
Number of pages7
JournalJournal of Human Evolution
Volume52
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Mar 2007

Keywords

  • apes
  • gaze following
  • eyes
  • social cognition
  • ORANGUTANS PONGO-PYGMAEUS
  • EXPERIMENTER-GIVEN CUES
  • OBJECT-CHOICE TASK
  • UNIQUE MORPHOLOGY
  • ASPERGER-SYNDROME
  • HUNTING BEHAVIOR
  • VISUAL-ATTENTION
  • PAN-TROGLODYTES
  • NORMAL ADULTS
  • CHIMPANZEES

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