Joint attention, as a set of socio-cognitive abilities to establish common ground in general communicative activities (Tomasello et al., 2005), is essential for social behaviors such as cooperation and language, yet the reason why humans, compared with nonhuman primates, possess an exclusively high level of joint attention remains unknown. Comparative evidence between humans and contemporary animals implies that a high level of joint attention is a humanunique prerequisite for communication and language (Tomasello, 2008), but such conclusions overlook the limitations of the comparative approach and fail to address questions such as whether the initial level of joint attention in humans must be high, and if not, what factors induce the level difference.
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