gaze study
Scientists from the University of Portsmouth studied gaze following – looking where a companion is looking.
Gaze following is seen as a key marker of social development because following the gaze of another is a way to obtain important information about the environment and is closely linked to the ability to understand what others are thinking.
Scientists studied crested macaques both in the wild and at Marwell and found they followed the gaze of another regardless of the other’s status as a friend, family member or dominant member of the group, but when it came to friends, the speed with which a macaque looked in the same direction was much faster.
Authors PhD student Jerome Micheletta and Dr Bridget Waller, both of the university’s Department of Psychology, said the findings point to friendship being an important influence in shaping the way the primates see the world and cope with its challenges.
Mr Micheletta said the findings reveal something about the evolution of friendship and its links with cognition and communication, which have not been studied before.
Friendship influences gaze-following ability
The study showed that friendship, more than family ties or the status of another, improves the gaze-following ability of this particular macaque species.
Gaze following is not an automatic response but is flexible and depends on the situation and relationship between animals. It is known to take place in a wide range of animals including humans, chimpanzees, goats, dolphins, jackdaws and tortoises, but how specific social dynamics affect individual gaze following has been until now poorly understood.
The research proves there is nothing random about who follows whose gaze, or how speedily they pick up the sometimes very subtle changes to another’s eye movements.
The scientists’ main finding is that gaze following is strongly influenced by the degree of friendship between the macaques. Friends did not react more often to the gaze of those who weren’t friends, but reacted much faster to friends’ gazes regardless of the subtlety or lack of it in the informants’ movements. These results suggest that this effect of friendship seems independent of social status and family relationships.
Their study is published in the journal Animal Behaviour.
More information can be found on the University of Portsmouth's website here
Pictures courtesy of Jerome Micheletta and Macaca Nigra Project.
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