Infant and Child DevelopmentInf. Child Dev. 15: 191–193 (2006)

Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/icd.433

Commentary on The Development of Mentalistic Gaze Under-standing

Understanding the Directedness ofGaze: Three Ways of Doing It

Chris MooreUniversity of Toronto, Canada

It is argued that alongside the mentalistic and the behaviouristicforms, there is a third kind of gaze understanding. Gaze may beunderstood to be subjective in the sense that there can bediversity across self and other in terms of what is seen, without itbeing understood to be representational. This form of gazeunderstanding is more consistent with the evidence on toddlers’understanding of gaze and may well represent a developmentallyintermediate form between the behaviouristic and mentalisticforms discussed in the target article. Copyright # 2006 JohnWiley & Sons, Ltd.

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In their paper, the author considers what counts as understanding the mentalisticnature of gaze and in what developmental and phylogenetic contexts suchunderstanding is exhibited. Early in the paper, mentalistic understanding isdefined as ‘the ability to represent a relationship between the eyes and an object,and represent the relationship as being representational in some way (p. 3)’. Thisis a definition of gaze understanding as metarepresentational–understanding‘seeing’ as ‘seeing as’. The non-mentalistic alternative offered is that gaze isunderstood in terms of the behaviours (head direction, eye direction) by whichseeing is manifested and the spatial relations of these behaviours to objects in theenvironment. The author concludes that there is only evidence for a mentalisticunderstanding of gaze in humans from about 3 years of age. Before that time,children’s understanding is not mentalistic. Furthermore, it is suggested thatthere is no good evidence for mentalistic understanding of gaze in otherprimates. Children younger than about 3 years and all other primates, it isargued, understand gaze in terms of spatial relations between gaze behavioursand objects.

In my view, this distinction between essentially behaviouristic and mentalisticrepresentations of gaze does not exhaust the possibilities. In fact, there are at leastthree ways of understanding gaze, and the author glosses over an importantdevelopmental (and perhaps phylogenetic) step in not recognizing the third way(which is actually the second way developmentally). The third way is tounderstand gaze as subjective without it necessarily being mentalistic. Whatcounts as understanding the subjective nature of gaze? Such understandingentails that there may be diversity across self and other in terms of what may be

Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

seen, for example, that I may see an object that you may not, given the barrierbetween you and the object, or that you may see something that I currently donot, given a barrier between me and the object. This understanding is not thesame as recognizing the representational nature of seeing because seeing is notunderstood as involving a representation of the object. But nor is it the same asrepresenting the spatial relation between gaze behaviours and objects.

Why cannot simple diversity of seeing across self and other be represented interms of the spatial relation between gaze behaviours and targets? The reason isthat while it is possible to link gaze behaviours of others to objects in the world,using what we have called ‘third-person’ information (see Barresi and Moore,1996), it is not possible to do the same for self because we do not have third-person access to our own gaze behaviour. The only way to represent our ownseeing is in terms of its first-person characteristics}the phenomenologicalcharacteristics of vision. So understanding others’ gaze may start out as arepresentation of the relation between their behaviour and objects in the world,but understanding our own gaze cannot start out that way. The implication forunderstanding simple diversity of seeing is that children must find a way torecognize that the third-person manifestations of others’ seeing are commensur-able with the first-person manifestations of their own seeing. We have arguedthat children achieve this through participation in episodes of shared or jointattention with others to objects (Barresi and Moore, 1996). In such episodes,children are exposed simultaneously to both the third-person manifestations ofseeing and the first-person manifestations of seeing. These distinct forms ofinformation may then be combined into representations that code for both third-and first-person information. In effect, these representations are equallyapplicable to both others and the self. It is these representations that also allowchildren to appreciate the potential diversity of seeing across self and other.

There is quite good evidence that by 18–24 months, children have such anunderstanding of seeing. A variety of forms of evidence are relevant here. Theauthor cites and dismisses research by Lempers et al. (1977), but this work andother studies by Flavell’s group (e.g. Masangkay et al., 1974) are quite telling.Lempers et al. (1977) report a particularly interesting phenomenon wherebyyoung toddlers were unable to show a picture to someone else withoutmaintaining it in their own vision, but, by about 24 months, children were ableto void their own vision of an object so that someone else might see it. In general,so-called level I perspective-taking is quite well established in 2-year-olds. At thesame age children acquire the language of perception and are quite able to talkwith others about the visual experiences of self and other in the same terms(Bretherton and Beeghly, 1982). The evidence, then, supports the idea that byabout 2 years, children do understand the subjective nature of others’ gaze (justas they do understand the objective nature of their own gaze).

The situation in non-human primates is less clear-cut. Although there appearsto be little good evidence for level I perspective-taking in monkeys, currently,there is some debate among the leading experimental ape researchers aboutwhether chimpanzees understand the subjectivity of gaze (see Tomasello et al.,2003; Povinelli and Vonk, 2004) Tomasello and his colleagues have argued, basedon their results showing chimpanzee sensitivity to dominant conspecifics’ gazedirection in a competitive foraging context (e.g. Hare et al., 2000) that theseanimals do understand gaze in more than simply a behavioural sense. Povinelliand his colleagues have disputed these findings and their interpretation and holdto the view that chimpanzees do not attribute any abstract psychological states toother organisms.

C. Moore192

Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Inf. Child Dev. 15: 191–193 (2006)

Leaving aside the phylogenetic uncertainty, it is probable that understandingthe potential subjective diversity of gaze is an important developmental step onthe way to a mentalistic understanding of gaze. Having a representationalconcept of seeing requires the recognition that self and other may have diverseperspectives on the world. Without a recognition of diversity there is no sense inwhich a representation needs to be postulated to ‘intervene’ between viewer andobject. We suggest that a mentalistic concept of gaze could not arise from a purelybehaviouristic one, rather it first requires that a form of understanding thatattributes a subjective sense of vision to both self and others be in place. And thiswe claim is achieved by 2 years of age.

REFERENCES

Barresi J, Moore C. 1996. Intentional relations and social understanding. Behavioural andBrain Sciences 19: 107–122.

Bretherton I, Beeghly M. Talking about internal states: the acquisition of an explicit theoryof mind. Developmental Psychology 18: 906–921.

Hare B, Call J, Agnetta B, Tomasello M. 2000. Chimpanzees know what conspecifics doand do not see. Animal Behaviour 59: 771–786.

Lempers JD, Flavell ER, Flavell JH. 1977. The development in very young children of tacitknowledge concerning visual perception. Genetic Psychology Monographs 95: 3–53.

Masangkay Z, McCluskey K, McIntyre C, Sims-Knight J, Vaughn B, Flavell J. 1974. Theearly development of inferences about the visual percepts of others. Child Development45: 357–366.

Povinelli DJ, Vonk J. 2004. We don’t need a microscope to explore the chimpanzee’s mind.Mind and Language 19: 1–28.

Tomasello M, Call J, Hare B. 2003. Chimpanzees understand psychological states}thequestions is which ones and to what extent. Trends in Cognitive Science 7: 153–156.

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Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Inf. Child Dev. 15: 191–193 (2006)