Picture this: You’re at a bar and someone clearly intoxicated starts telling your friend their grand theory about how the Titan submersible implosion was faked. Your friend locks eyes with you, clearly wanting to leave this dreadful conversation. She makes eyes to the door. Following someone’s gaze may seem like a simple act, but it has profound implications for the evolution of intelligence. And humans are far from the only animals that do it.

A recent study of bottlenose dolphins in the journal Heliyon adds to previous research identifying the ability to follow the gazes of members of other species — a visual and cognitive trick that may relate to the development of empathy — across a wide range of mammals, not just humans and our fellow primates. What’s even more interesting is to trace this ability through not just the mammal family but beyond, to reptiles and birds — and perhaps back as far as the Jurassic period.

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Doing so reveals not just aspects of how the human capacity for empathy may have evolved from traits seen in our ancestors, but also displays the mysterious details of evolution by natural selection. While not driven by any conscious or guiding force, it can in a way be seen as nature’s imagination — which sometimes comes up with the same ideas over and over again.

Gaze following can help an animal identify predators or see what tasty treats their same-species competitor has discovered, among other useful things.

To evaluate animals’ abilities to follow the direction a human experimenter is gazing — for example, noticing the experimenter looking at food and then checking back to be sure before going for the reward — researchers teach the animals how to independently gain a reward. Then, scientists being mean buggers, will give them a similar task that is unsolvable: this is called the “impossible task paradigm.”

An animal’s ability to follow the gaze of another, including another species, may form a basis for advanced social cognition.

But, given an impossible task by Elias Garcia-Pelegrin and his team of researchers (who did not respond to an email interview request from Salon), bottlenose dolphins were not, in fact, driven mad in frustration; instead, they demonstrated the ability to use human attentional cues, staying still and quickly alternating their gaze between the experimenter and the object of the impossible task — while giving up the gaze alternation as soon as the lead experimenter’s back was turned towards them.

Of note: gaze following isn’t a single thing; the impossible task literature divides it into various types, which may suggest different cognitive abilities on the part of the experimental animal. “High-level” gaze following, like the dolphins demonstrated, involves putting oneself in the shoes of another by watching where they are looking to see from the other’s perspective.

In general, by identifying important objects in their environment, an animal’s ability to follow the gaze of another, including another species, may form a basis for advanced social cognition, paving the way for cooperation and empathy.

One such high level type, “geometrical gaze following,” occurs if you block the thing that the other is looking at so the subject can’t see it, so that they will physically reposition themself to see what others are seeing. Geometrical gaze following isn’t even seen in human children before eighteen months of age – and yet wolves, apes and monkeys, and birds of the crow (corvid) and starling genuses have all been found to engage in it. You’ll notice, perhaps, that the trait has therefore been seen in various mammal families (primates and the dog-like animals, called canids), as well as some but not all birds. But what does this mean?

Most likely, it suggests that visual perspective-taking or gaze following evolved independently in mammal groups that had........

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