The Effect of Body Orientation on Judgments of Human Visual Attention in Western Lowland Gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla)

The ability to appreciate the attentional states of others is an important element used in discerning the presence of Theory of Mind in an individual. Whether primates are able to recognize attention, and further, use such information to predict behavior, remains contentious. In this study, six western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) were tested under different conditions that aimed to investigate not only their understanding of what a human experimenter sees, but also what information they use to make these judgments. In all experiments the gorillas selected between two human experimenters, one who could see them and one who could not. In Experiment 1 the gorillas' performance was significantly above chance in conditions where they judged body orientation, head orientation, and eyes. Experiment 2 showed that the gorillas' initial judgments of attention may be based on body orientation rather than facial cues. Experiment 3 demonstrated that the gorillas were better able to utilize facial cues in some conditions, when these cues were paired with a more neutral body orientation. These findings suggest that the gorillas are using a hierarchical approach to determining visual attention, by making an immediate decision based on the most salient cue-body orientation. However, when body orientation is more ambiguous their ability to judge the less prominent cues of the face and eyes does improve.