| Abstract: | What capabilities are required for an organism to evince an ‘explicit’ understanding of gaze as a mentalistic phenomenon? One possibility is that mentalistic interpretations of gaze, like concepts of unseen, supernatural beings, are culturally‐specific concepts, acquired through cultural learning. These abstract concepts may either require a shared, symbolic code for intergenerational transmission and therefore be uniquely human cognitive phenomena (like belief in Santa Claus) or, alternatively, language may only facilitate their acquisition. Thus, the possibility remains that other organisms can acquire these mentalistic conceptions of gaze, perhaps over much longer time courses, compared to humans, which would limit to very long‐lived species the possibility of acquiring these abstract concepts. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
