Touch, Pointing, and Mind-Reading

Pointing and the joint attention between agents that it establishes, play a foundational role in human communication and cooperation. How this capacity emerges in development and evolution is therefore a central question for our understanding of distinctively human communication. Here we face two mysteries. The first is where does pointing come from? There are many candidates in early infancy that could be precursors of pointing – including reaching, touching, and copying others. The second is how does pointing support infants’ understanding of others’ communicative intentions, which seems, paradoxically, to develop after pointing has emerged. Here I argue that some automatic aspects of human behaviour – namely touch exploration in infants, and adults’ automatic tendency to look at what they touch – lead to early pointing behaviour without requiring either infant or adult to think about the others’ intentions. Once this behaviour begins, it sets up a ‘joint attention triangle’ between agents that provides a natural platform for our understanding of the minds of others to develop, both in early development and our evolution.