Follow that gaze: Evolutionary science says monkeys and humans share same staring behaviour

Like humans, monkeys exhibit the same pattern of following another’s gaze throughout their lives, suggesting the behaviour is deeply rooted in our evolutionary past, according to a new study. Following another’s gaze is a hallmark of human learning and socialisation from infancy to old age. “Gaze-following is a crucial developmental pathway, which lays foundation for acquiring language and interacting socially,” said Laurie Santos, psychologist at Yale University in the US.

“Here we find that gaze-following emerges in the same way in a species with an entirely different life history,” said Santos. Santos, Alexandra Rosati of Harvard University, Michael Platt of University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), and colleagues tested how 481 rhesus monkeys living in a preserve responded to the upward glance of a researcher.

As with most human babies, infant monkeys began gaze-following from a very early age. However, they tended to take more looks than human babies do to find out what the researcher was looking at, even after three or four glances showed nothing of interest.

By their juvenile years, monkeys became more flexible in their gaze-following and became habituated to repeated gazes over time. During adulthood, monkeys’ responses were more varied, and they began showing human-like sex differences, with females responding to gazes more than males.

Older monkeys - like older humans - then became less sensitive to gaze cues overall. Santos said this is the first study to show such a close relationship between social development in humans and monkeys.

Testing such a large number of monkeys will also enable this team to study individual behavioural and genetic variations between animals, she said. These results provide exciting new evidence that monkeys’ social attention follows a remarkably human-like trajectory across age groups, said the researchers.

“Monkeys have different social experiences than humans, grow up much faster than we do, and do not share features of human ageing such as menopause yet they show the same changes as humans in this foundational social skill from infancy to old age” said Rosati, lead author of the study.

These findings suggest that some social capacities such as gaze following may have a deeper biological basis than previously thought, Rosati said. The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.