Acquisition of joint attention by olive baboons gesturing toward humans

Abstract

Joint attention is a core ability of human social cognition which broadly refers to the coordination of attention with both the presence and activity of social partners. In both human and non-human primates, joint attention can be assessed from behaviour; gestures and gaze alternation between the partner and a distal object are standard behavioural manifestations of joint attention. Here we examined the acquisition of joint attention in olive baboons as a function of their individual experience of a human partner's attentional states during training regimes. Eleven olive baboons (Papio anubis) were observed during their training to perform food-requesting gestures, which occurred either by (1) a human facing them (face condition), or (2) by a human positioned in profile who never turned to them (profile condition). We found neither gestures nor gaze alternation were present at the start of the training but rather developed over the training period. Only baboons in the face condition showed an increase in the number of gaze alternations, and their gaze pattern progressively shifted to a coordinated sequence in which gazes and gestures were coordinated in time. In contrast, baboons trained by a human in profile showed significantly less coordination of gazes with gestures but still learned to request food with their gestures. These results suggest that the partner's social attention plays an important role in the acquisition of visual joint attention and, to a lesser extent, in gesture learning in baboons. Interspecific interactions appear to offer rich opportunities to manipulate and thus identify the social contexts in which socio-communicative skills develop.

Red-capped mangabeys (Cercocebus torquatus) adapt their interspecific gestural communication to the recipient’s behaviour

“…In this way, mangabeys may indeed direct the attention of the experimenter toward the food reward 50 . This corroborates previous results showing that gaze alternations accompany learnt begging or pointing gestures in other non-human primate species (e.g., orangutans 21 ; chimpanzees 35 , 36 ; olive baboons 28 , 29 , 47 ; rhesus and Tonkean macaques 31 , 36 ; squirrel monkeys 45 ). In olive baboons, the frequency of gaze alternations during requesting-gesture events was not associated with an individual’s communication experience with humans 46 .…”

“…We believe that when the experimenter was facing the subjects but holding the reward in his hands behind his back, the mangabeys did not perceive him as ‘available’ to give the food reward directly, so therefore they did not beg for it. Additionally, together with the fact that mangabeys produced gaze alternations when gesturing, this suggests that begging gestures could be functionally referential to the food reward 35 , 47 , 71 , especially considering that previous research highlighted red-capped mangabeys’ ability for referential gestures 72 . One could also say that the production of the learnt begging gesture is just not very flexible and that during BT condition, the experimenter’s posture was too different from the human’s posture during training.…”

“…This has been evidenced also in some monkey species’ interspecific gestures (i.e. squirrel monkeys 45 ; olive baboons 46 , 47 ; Tonkean and rhesus macaques 31 , 38 ).…”

The coordination of attention and action in great apes and humans

“…The term joint attention is sometimes used to describe such situations (e.g. [1]), but in the human psychology literature, something more is indicated, specifically, an active coordination of attention in which both individuals know together in their common ground (i.e. common knowledge) that they are co-orienting to an external entity.…”

Contribution of Developmental Psychology to the Study of Social Interactions: Some Factors in Play, Joint Attention and Joint Action and Implications for Robotics

“…A couple of months later, they are able to alternate their gaze between their partner and the object of interest, which represents a key feature of intentional triadic interactions ( Cochet and Vauclair, 2010 ). At 16 months of age, gaze toward the adult can precede the production of pointing ( Franco and Butterworth, 1996 ), suggesting that children may thus take into account the partner’s attentional state before initiating communication ( Lamaury et al, 2017 ).…”