Humans and great apes visually track event roles in similar ways

Abstract

Human language relies on a rich cognitive machinery, partially shared with other animals. One key mechanism, however, decomposing events into causally linked agent–patient roles, has remained elusive with no known animal equivalent. In humans, agent–patient relations in event cognition drive how languages are processed neurally and expressions structured syntactically. We compared visual event tracking between humans and great apes, using stimuli that would elicit causal processing in humans. After accounting for attention to background information, we found similar gaze patterns to agent–patient relations in all species, mostly alternating attention to agents and patients, presumably in order to learn the nature of the event, and occasionally privileging agents under specific conditions. Six-month-old infants, in contrast, did not follow agent–patient relations and attended mostly to background information. These findings raise the possibility that event role tracking, a cognitive foundation of syntax, has evolved long before language but requires time and experience to become ontogenetically available.