The coordination of attention and action in great apes and humans

Abstract

Great apes can discern what others are attending to and even direct others' attention to themselves in flexible ways. But they seemingly do not coordinate their attention with one another recursively—understanding that the other is monitoring their attention just as they are monitoring hers—in acts of joint attention, at least not in the same way as young human children. Similarly, great apes collaborate with partners in many flexible ways, but they seemingly do not coordinate with others to form mutually obligating joint goals and commitments, nor regulate the collaboration via acts of intentional communication, at least not in the same way as young human children. The hypothesis defended here is that it is precisely in their capacities to coordinate attention and action with others—that is, in their capacities for shared intentionality—that humans are most clearly distinguished from other great apes. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Revisiting the human ‘interaction engine’: comparative approaches to social action coordination’.

Revisiting the human ‘interaction engine’: comparative approaches to social action coordination

“…However, recipient affordances such as physical distance and familiarity might affect the coordination process in these artificial scenarios [58], as they have a major impact on effective communication. Thus, many field researchers who have witnessed spontaneous cooperative interactions in a more natural setting may argue that it is inappropriate, or at best premature, to assume that 'communicating in order to coordinate does not come naturally and easily to chimpanzees' [44]. This latter notion is also hard to reconcile with the rich evidence on highly flexible communicative strategies deployed for the solicitation and coordination of joint activities like consortship [66], social grooming [27,67,68] and social play [30,[69][70][71][72].…”

“…Focusing on emergent pre-conventional, or ‘incipient', forms of behaviours that lead to conventional forms of gestures, they argue that these signals are the product of a series of gradual cognitive and motoric developments in the context of repeated social interactions. Their findings suggest that socio-interactional experiences with caregiver-assisted and -initiated acts of joint attention are the core niche in which conventional signal use emerges (in contrast to great apes, who presumably do not engage in triadic interactions at this level, [ 44 , 45 ]).…”

“…Whether intention recognition also plays a constraining role in great ape cooperation is addressed by Alicia Melis & Federico Rossano [ 58 ]. The authors specifically discuss the cross-modal communicative strategies und underlying degree of intentionality during experimental cooperative stag hunt scenarios—a possible evolutionary niche of the interactional base for language [ 44 ]. They propose that great apes' communicative performance in such cooperation settings might be constrained owing to their limited capacity in comprehending helpful intent, insofar as signals are mainly understood as imperative acts (signallers wanting something) rather than as helpful cues (signallers wanting to share helpful information).…”

“…Yet, despite the relevance of ostensive–inferential communication in human evolution [ 3 , 44 ], it remains among one of the most obscure features of the interaction engine. This is partly due to the inherent difficulty of operationalizing such concepts for comparative research.…”

“…In a final opinion piece, Michael Tomasello [ 44 ] attempts to reconcile the idea of human social action being unique in many ways with the accumulating evidence on potentially shared capacities of the human interaction engine. In reviewing recent findings, he defends the hypothesis that only humans coordinate joint attention recursively—with the mutual understanding that they are doing so together—and engage in mutually obligating joint goals and commitments via acts of intentional communication.…”