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. 2010 Mar 19;4:5. doi: 10.3389/fnint.2010.00005

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Copyright © 2010 Shepherd.

This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.

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Ontogeny of primate gaze following. Humans, apes, and monkeys are sensitive to direct gaze at, or soon after, birth. However, their understanding of deictic gaze develops during childhood. Human gaze following arises early in life, with responses to turned heads and averted eyes arising between 2–6 months; gaze following at 10–12 months predicts language acquisition over the next year. Near the 1-year mark, human gaze following becomes more sophisticated: it is contingent on cue's eyes being open at 11 months, and on the cue having recently looked at interesting things by 14 months; by 18 months, humans follow gaze geometrically to regions beyond their immediate line of sight. By contrast, much less is known about the development of nonhuman gaze following. Apes and monkeys both appear more sensitive to head direction than to eyes. Both habituate to misleading gaze cues during adolescence, and as adults, follow gaze geometrically and from eye cues; the precise onset of these abilities is uncertain.