Motor Intentions in Another Person’s Eyes

Previous research has provided evidence for a neural system underlying the observation of another person’s intentional hand actions. Is this action observation system also important for inferring other people intentions from eye gaze? Here we consider two pieces of evidence suggesting that this may be the case. First, kinematic evidence suggesting that the difficulties children with autism show in reading intention from eye gaze may depend on a lack of motor contagion. Second, neuroimaging evidence demonstrating that the observation of object-directed gaze alerts similar neural circuits as those alerted by the observation of object-directed grasping actions. Altogether, these findings seem to suggest that a common intentional system may underlie the representation of both hand-object relations and gaze-object relations.