近日，日本京都大学的一项研究指出，婴儿是通过观察别人面部表情变化来理解人的行为并认识各类事物的。相关研究报告发表在英国在线科学杂志《自然·通讯》（Nature Communications）上。
京都大学副教授明和政子领导的一个研究小组让13名出生8个月和1岁的婴儿以及6只5岁至15岁的黑猩猩观看一段录像，里面演示一名女性把瓶中果汁倒入杯里的过程，然后观察婴儿和黑猩猩视线的变化。结果发现，婴儿不仅会看果汁和杯子，还会用一半的时间观看这名女性的面部，而黑猩猩观察女性面部的时间不到1%，几乎全部集中在瓶子和杯子上。
明和政子说：“婴儿会拼命地看别人的面部，希望弄清对方的心理状态。不是光看行为的表面部分，而是对照心理状态，预测下一步的活动。”明和教授还说，这是一种为适应复杂的社会环境而进行学习的模式，并且这有可能是人和黑猩猩在进化道路上分开后，人类自身发展出来的独有能力。（生物谷Bioon.com）
doi:10.1038/ncomms1695
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Humans and chimpanzees attend differently to goal-directed actions
Masako Myowa-Yamakoshi, Céline Scola & Satoshi Hirata
Humans comprehend the actions of others by making inferences about intentional mental states of another. However, little is known about how this capacity develops and whether this is shared with other animals. Here we show the ontogenetic and evolutionary foundations of this ability by comparing the eye movements of 8- and 12-month-old human infants, adults and chimpanzees as they watched videos presenting goal-directed and non-goal-directed actions by an actor. We find that chimpanzees anticipate action goals in the same way as do human adults. Humans and chimpanzees, however, scan goal-directed actions differently. Humans, particularly infants, refer to actors' faces significantly more than do chimpanzees. In human adults, attentional allocation to an actor's face changes as the goal-directed actions proceed. In the case of non-goal-directed actions, human adults attend less often to faces relative to goal-directed actions. These findings indicate that humans have a predisposition to observe goal-directed actions by integrating information from the actor.
