Primates, motion and emotion

Focussing on the capacity for joint attention and communication, we review research that demonstrates the important and often overlooked role that emotion and motion may play in intersubjectivity and consciousness of self and others. We discuss the source of the continuing belief that such skills are uniquely human and suggest that there are no good grounds to deny such capacities to the other great apes. We suggest that despite the recent resurgence of interest in intersubjectivity, emotion and the lived body, mainstream contemporary developmental and comparative theory may still be based on questionable assumptions about the relation between mind and behaviour and simplistic notions of mental and evolutionary causation. Keywords: intersubjectivity; joint attention; non-human primates; Wittgenstein; evolution