Study Reveals Great Apes Share Human-Like Event Perception

Research shows great apes can track agent-patient roles, a cognitive ability linked to the evolution of human language.

Great apes and humans both focus on agents and patients during events, ignoring background details, according to a new study in PLOS Biology.
The study used eye-tracking technology to analyze how apes, adult humans, and six-month-old infants watched short video clips of agent-patient interactions.
While apes and adult humans alternated their gaze between agents and patients, infants focused primarily on background elements, suggesting this ability develops over time.
The findings indicate that the cognitive mechanism for event decomposition likely evolved before human language, contributing to linguistic structure and syntax.
Researchers propose that social cognition and brain size may have driven the evolution of human language, though apes lack the motivation or resources to develop similar communication systems.