Humans comprehend the actions of others by making inferences about intentional mental states of another. However, little is known about how this capacity develops and whether this is shared with other animals. Here we show the ontogenetic and evolutionary foundations of this ability by comparing the eye movements of 8- and 12-month-old human infants, adults and chimpanzees as they watched videos presenting goal-directed and non-goal-directed actions by an actor. We find that chimpanzees anticipate action goals in the same way as do human adults. Humans and chimpanzees, however, scan goal-directed actions differently. Humans, particularly infants, refer to actors' faces significantly more than do chimpanzees. In human adults, attentional allocation to an actor's face changes as the goal-directed actions proceed. In the case of non-goal-directed actions, human adults attend less often to faces relative to goal-directed actions. These findings indicate that humans have a predisposition to observe goal-directed actions by integrating information from the actor.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 5. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 16 July 2013.
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#6,196,094
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#34,090
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Outputs of similar age
#41,219
of 156,309 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Nature Communications
#71
of 140 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 22,663,150 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 72nd percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 46,588 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 55.4. This one is in the 26th percentile – i.e., 26% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 140 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one is in the 49th percentile – i.e., 49% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
