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Gaze following, a key component of social attention, has received substantial research interest over the past few decades. There has been an increasing trend to study gaze following using controlled computer-based laboratory tasks. While these methods offer more control over the experimental setting, they remove much of what is unique about real-world social situations. This chapter argues that the use of highly simplified, structured social attention experiments may be reducing the natural variance in behavior that is expected in real-world social settings, thus limiting what social attention researchers can discover. Examples are drawn from research with healthy individuals and individuals with known social attention difficulties (i.e., autism spectrum disorders [ASD]). These examples illustrate that the most interesting and robust social attention findings may come from an approach that seeks to incorporate the complexity and ambiguity of real-world social situations. This approach, Cognitive Ethology, is discussed.

This chapter reviews literature on infants' representations of agents. It characterizes the core domain, detailing the concepts of agency that are at issue. It then sketches evidence that infants represent the actions of agents as goal directed, and contrasts two different proposals for the systems of concepts that are deployed in these representations. It considers the competing empiricist hypothesis that the relevant innate representations are perceptual, and that the infant learns concepts of agency through some learning mechanism that operates over sensory and spatio-temporal primitives. It turns to a second aspect of agency—that agents are capable of attending to and providing information about events and things in the world, again sketching the evidence that infants represent agents as such and countering leaner interpretations of the data presented. It examines whether core cognition of agency exemplifies other key features of core cognition. Finally, the chapter discusses whether and in what ways the preschooler's theory of mind transcends core cognition of agency.

A wide variety of well-studied phenomena associated with mindreading are surveyed to probe the consistency of what is known about them with our version of simulation theory. These phenomena include key ontogenetic stages such as gaze following, early intention tracking, and role play, as well as the psychopathology of autism. A link between mirror-neuron dysfunction and autism provides suggestive support for the simulation approach. Our distinction between low-level and high-level simulation fits comfortably with dual-process theories in cognitive science that draw a fundamental distinction between automatic and controlled processes. A tentative conjecture is offered about the evolution of simulation and mindreading, at least for more primitive kinds of simulation.

Clinicians describe joint attention difficulties such as a lack of gaze-following, pointing, and showing as the most significant problems that are seen in children with autism. What psychological impairment prevents these behaviours from appearing? This chapter takes one kind of joint attention difficulty — the lack of gaze-following in children with autism — and outlines the proposal that this impairment arises from an orienting impairment that arises early in development. It argues that despite an ability to orient, shift, and disengage attention to objects, children with autism have a very basic difficulty in dyadic orienting to other people that has impact on predictive gaze-following ability and on the development of subsequent symbolic skills.

Chimpanzees follow the gaze of conspecifics and humans — follow it past distractors and behind barriers, ‘check back’ with humans when gaze following does not yield interesting sights, use gestures appropriately depending on the visual access of their recipient, and select different pieces of food depending on whether their competitor has visual access to them. Taken together, these findings make a strong case for the hypothesis that chimpanzees have some understanding of what other individuals can and cannot see. However, chimpanzees do not seem nearly so skillful in the Gesture Choice and Object Choice experimental paradigms. Neither behavioral conditioning nor theory of mind explanations can account for these results satisfactorily. Instead this chapter proposes the idea that chimpanzees have the cognitive skills to recall, represent, categorize, and reason about the behavior and perception of others, but not their intentional or mental states, because they do not know that others have such states since they cannot make a link to their own. Human beings began their own evolutionary trajectory with these same skills, but then at some point in their evolution (probably quite recently) they began to understand that their own experience could serve as some kind of model for that of other persons. This allowed for even better prediction and control of the behavior of others and better communication and cooperation with them as well, and so it was an adaptation with immediate adaptive consequences that ensured its survival.

This chapter considers infants' understanding that acts of attention — looking and pointing — as object-directed, that is, as implying a relation between the agent who produces them and the object at which they are directed. Sensitivity to the object-directed structure of these actions provides an essential framework for understanding the phenomenological, psychological, and behavioural implications of these actions. The evidence reviewed indicates that although young infants sometimes orient appropriately in response to others' gaze shifts and points, they seem not to understand these actions as object-directed until late in the first year of life. Findings of relatively early success at orienting but later success in action understanding raise questions about the mechanisms by which action understanding emerges, and these are considered at the end of the chapter.

Developmental research shows that three-year-olds fail explicit theory of mind tasks, yet younger children are sensitive to differences in actors' mental states. Comparably discrepant findings occur with gaze understanding: children cannot judge another's eye-direction until three years but follow gaze from early infancy. Drawing the minimal necessary conclusions from gaze research, I argue that two-year-olds understand social interactions in terms of people's involvements with objects or situations: engagement. This confers considerable social ability without postulating understanding of representational mental states. Subsequent development in gaze understanding co-occurs with explicit theory of mind development, and is discontinuous with earlier development. Four-year-olds develop a novel system for social understanding.

This chapter looks at the potential insight shown when individuals take account of others’ gaze. Gaze-following is widespread in animals, based on head-gaze: eye-gaze is difficult, without the white sclera of the human eye. Appropriate choice of location in an object-choice experiment may be a result of automatic gaze-priming, once gaze is followed. A long-standing conflict between experiments and observations, into whether monkeys and apes can understand line-of-sight geometry and distinguish between seeing and knowing, is now resolved. Representing others’ knowledge and ignorance is widespread in animals (e.g., pigs, scrub jays, and ravens), but questions remain about whether these data imply insight into mechanism or not.

The “Like-Me” developmental hypothesis suggests that perceiving others as like me is a social primitive. The new empirical research shows that the core sense of similarity to others is not the culmination of social development, but the precondition for it. Without this initial felt connection to others, human social cognition would not take the distinctively human form that it does. This chapter discusses empirical studies concerning two social learning mechanisms that build on the “like-me” primitive—imitation and gaze following. The studies illuminate three aspects of social cognition: origins; mechanisms of change; and bidirectional learning between self and other. The studies support the view that “like me” is a social primitive that gives rise to a life-long ability to connect to other humans, which is vital to our survival as a species.

Where does our understanding of the mind come from? Here we focus on developmental plasticity and argue for a theory-theory account of children’s reasoning about the mind. Two examples are analyzed in depth: infants’ understanding of other people’s visual perspectives and children’s understanding of personality traits. In both we show that providing children particular patterns of evidence—whether about their own experience or about the behavior of others—leads them to create novel and systematic models of the mind. In both cases the idea of a “Bayesian framework principle” is invoked as a formal model of developmental change. It is argued that despite a shared initial state, key aspects of mental life vary in the myriad cultural, physical, and virtual environments human beings create. We show that theory-like inferential abilities, applied to conspecifics’ psychology, is particularly valuable for adapting to, and indeed thriving in that sort of social world.