Comparative Perspectives on Pointing and Joint Attention in Children and Apes

Abstract

Thecomprehension and production of manual pointing and joint visual attention are already well developed when human infants reach their second year. These early developmental milestones mark the infant's transition into accelerated linguistic competence and shared experiences with others. The ability to draw another's attention toward distal objects or events facilitates the development of complex cognitive processes such as language acquisition. A comparative approach allows us to examine the evolution of these phenomena. Of recent interest is whether non-human primates also gesture and manipulate the eye gaze direction of others when communicating. However,all captive apes do not use referential gestures such as pointing, or appear to understand the meaning of shared attention. Those that show evidence of these abilities differ in their expression of them, and this may be osely related to rearing history. This paper reviews the literature on the topic of pointing and joint attention in non-human primates with the goal of identifying why these abilities develop in other species, and to examine the potential sources of the existing individual variation in their expression.