By which I mean, what animals can or cannot ‘recognize’ eye contact? (I tried and failed to come up with a good definition of ‘recognizing’ it… I can personally only rely on intuition, both parties know when eye contact has been made) For instance, cats and dogs make eye contact with each other (and with people) all the time, but do squirrels? roaches? flies? fish? (the list goes on, these are just random examples…) What is the determining factor of whether or not a given animal can recognize it or not? Additionally, if some of the smaller creatures (beetles-size through small-snake-size) can recognize eye contact with each other, can they also recognize when I am looking at them? Obviously I have no idea where a beetle is looking, but can he tell where I’m looking? I have been wondering about this for quite some time, anyone know anything?
Tulkas
ps - I’m a longtime fan of the Straight Dope, but new to the message board as of a day or two ago - is there anywhere that will tell me what some of these strange abbreviations stand for (namely WAG)?
AFAIK, insects don’t have good enough visual resolution to be able to see details and I think their visual system is more tuned towards sensation of movement.
I suspect the ability to sense eye contact arises out of the need to know that a predator is watching you. I’d expect a lot of birds to have the ability (reasoning based on the fact that quite a few insects have ‘eye spots’ or other eye-mimic structures to protect them from predation.
I don’t know if “complexity” is what you want. “Level of importance” would be a better way to go… that is, some animals aren’t as reliant on sight as we are. Some probably get their information from scent or sound.
I would imagine, though, that most vertebrates have a natural instinct for eye contact. Animals like starfish, obviously, wouldn’t (or would they? I’ve been surprised by seemingly common-sensical things before).
Well, I think we should split this into two questions:
Which animals recognize that some other creature (human or same species or other) stares at them?
Which animals recognize eye contact, which is a two-way contact, meaning they are staring back?
I have two cats, and they never look me straight into the eyes. If they watch me and I turn my eyes on them, they turn away. If they accidentally look each other in the eyes then a fight starts. Which means, they recognize that I or another cat stares at them. They even recognize eye contact, but they avoid it by all means. To me it looks that they find eye-contact very much offending. So the human “communication” by eye-contact does not occur with cats.
There are butterflys that mimic the staring eyes of carnivores. They do so supposedly to avoid being eaten by birds. This suggests, that birds are aware if they are being watched and about to become prey. However, I once had two budgerigars (is this correct? Small australian parrots, most often green or blue?), and while I am sure that they watched me as long as I moved, I doubt, that they ever looked me straight into the eyes. So to me for birds: #1 Yes, #2 No.
Then again, you can certainly have the impression that an eagle owl will look you straight into the eyes. But I think, that’s something our mind makes up, just as it does with posters, where the person being photographed looked straight into the camera.
In general I would assume, that you will find “eye-contact” (in the sense of #1) only with mammals and among them more likely with carnivores and/or social ones (like wolves, monkeys, apes, horses, etc.). Also I think real eye-contact (in the sense of #2) is limited to those species, that recognize themselves in a mirror, which essentially means that only apes and a few monkeys will show this behavior.