Detection of directed gaze in rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta)

To examine the ability of monkeys to detect the direction of attention of other individuals, the authors quantitatively investigated the visual scanning pattern of rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) in response to visually presented images of a human frontal face. The present results demonstrated not only that monkeys predominantly gaze at the eyes as compared with other facial areas in terms of duration and number of fixations, but also that they gaze at the eyes for a longer time period and more frequently when a human face, presented as a stimulus, gazed at them than when the gaze was shifted. These results indicate that rhesus monkeys are sensitive to the directed gaze of humans, suggesting that monkeys pay more attention to the human whose attention is directed to them.