Infant and Child Development Inf. Child Dev. 15: 187–190 (2006) Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/icd.432 Commentary It Takes Time and Experience to Learn How To Interpret Gaze in Mentalistic Terms David A. Leavens* University of Sussex, UK What capabilities are required for an organism to evince an ‘explicit’ understanding of gaze as a mentalistic phenomenon? One possibility is that mentalistic interpretations of gaze, like concepts of unseen, supernatural beings, are culturally-specific concepts, acquired through cultural learning. These abstract concepts may either require a shared, symbolic code for intergenerational transmission and therefore be uniquely human cognitive phenomena (like belief in Santa Claus) or, alternatively, language may only facilitate their acquisition. Thus, the possibi- lity remains that other organisms can acquire these mentalistic conceptions of gaze, perhaps over much longer time courses, compared to humans, which would limit to very long-lived species the possibility of acquiring these abstract concepts. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Key words: gaze-following; theory of mind; chimpanzees; cultural learning                               Doherty argues that explicit understanding of gaze follows a complex ontogenetic profile over the first few years of life, in humans (Homo sapiens). This developmental profile is characterized, first, by a sensitivity to direct and averted gaze, later by an ability to follow head-turns and pointing, culminating, at about four years of age, in the ability to explicitly state the focus of attention of a social partner, based on eye-direction alone. Although children younger than four years and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) clearly follow head-orientation, neither these young children nor chimpanzees, in Doherty’s view, are capable of an explicit understanding of the mentalistic significance of gaze. Doherty suggests that, in humans and in contrast to the innate luminance-based system of gaze detection, a learned system ‘begins to operate at 3 years.’ How can it be that a learning process only begins at three years of life? Well, an obvious way in which mentalistic understanding of gaze can only begin to be learned Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. *Correspondence to: David A. Leavens, Department of Psychology, School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex, Falmer, East Sussex, BN1 9QH, UK. E-mail: davidl@sussex.ac.uk