The emergence of eye contact as an intersubjective signal in an infant gorilla: implications for models of early social cognition

• Autores: Juan Carlos Gómez
• Localización: Acción psicológica, ISSN 1578-908X, Vol. 7, Nº. 2, 2010 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Nuevos desarrollos en la investigación de la comunicación temprana), págs. 35-43
• Idioma: inglés
• Títulos paralelos:
  • El surgimiento del contacto ocular como señal intersubjetiva en una cría de gorila: implicaciones para los modelos de cognición social temprana
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo
• Resumen

  • This paper argues against both lean and rich interpretations of early social cognition in infants and apes using as an illustration the results of a longitudinal study comparing the emergence of joint attention and tool use patterns in an infant gorilla. In contrast with tool use (where well-formed manipulations resulted in near perfect rates of reward obtention) the emergence of well-formed acts of communication with eye contact not only had no effect upon the rewards obtained, but increased the proportion of �explicit denials� of requests. It is argued that this suggests eye contact is learned and used as an intersubjective signal of communicative intentionality and not through simple associative mechanisms of reward contingency detection. However, it is also argued that rich interpretations of early social cognition are not needed to explain the development of communicative and intersubjective intentions.