W10 Flashcards
(21 cards)
What is the self?
A term referring to an individual’s conscious awareness of their own being, including thoughts, emotions, identity and sense of agency.
What are the facets of ‘the self’ ?
- Bodily self
- Behavioural Self → how you behave
- Executive Self → executive function/how u tell urself to behave
- Cognitive self → how you know things
*Ideal self → what your culture/self has taught u
*Affective self
What are the kinds of self awareness?
1) Body representations
2) Interpersonal self awareness
3) Higher-order self-awareness
What does higher-order INTERPERSONAL self awareness involve? REM-C
Self-recognition: The developmental milestone where an infant understands they are a distinct individual, often demonstrated by mirror recognition.
Metarepresentation: The capacity to be aware of and reflect on one’s own thoughts and mental states (“seeing yourself thinking”).
**Temporally extended self-awareness: **Understanding the self as continuous across time, connecting past, present, and future selves.
**Conceptual self: **Having an explicit, abstract understanding of oneself through traits, evaluations (like self-esteem), and social roles.
What evidence is there for interpersonal self-awareness?
Studies on imitation in infants offer some insights.
**Melzoff (2007) **found that infants at a very young age can **imitate tongue protrusion. **
Although replication with other behaviors is challenging due to infants’ natural tongue exploration → newborns are known to protrude their tongue in lots of circumstances
Gergely, Bekkering & Kiraly (2002) demonstrated selective imitation.
1) Infants imitated a novel head-touching action to turn on a light more when the adult’s hands were occupied, suggesting they infer the reason behind the action.
2)When the adult’s hands were free, infants were more likely to use their own hands, indicating an understanding of the goal and function (like the adult is trying to teach them how to do it correctly)
What are pedagogical adaptations?
According to **Csibra & Gergely (2006), ** imitation is an pedagogical adaptations.
Infants repeat actions they have been taught → indicates interpersonal awareness → implies they recognize the adult’s intent to teach.
Mirror and Sticker
How is reflective self-awareness tested?
1) The mirror recognition test, like the rouge test, is commonly used. Infants typically show self-recognition (touching the rouge on their face) after 18 months
2) The sticker test, using live vs. pre-recorded video of the child with a sticker, also assesses this, with children around 5 years old typically can locate the sticker when the video is in real-time.
How is self-awareness, specifically metarepresentation, assessed?
Goupil et al. (2015) found that 20-month-old infants demonstrate metarepresentational abilities by monitoring their own certainty.
1) Child shown object, then object is hidden, than delay asked to point where they saw it -> longer the delay harder to find object
2) In second condition they r told they can ask for help, more common when delay is longer
They are more likely to seek help in challenging situations and are more successful when they do, suggesting an **awareness **of their own knowledge states and limitations.
How are self-perception and action interconnected in bodily awareness?
Self bodily perception informs our actions, and conversely, our interactions with the world refine our bodily perception.
Early on, infants lack precise bodily awareness, gradually developing it through experience (e.g., realizing biting their hand causes self-inflicted pain).
Why is touch considered a foundational bodily sense?
Touch is our first developing sense, with overt responses appearing earlier than other senses. It’s crucial for representing our bodily self. From an evolutionary standpoint, the ability to sense touch and pain is vital for avoiding harm.
Anatomical studies show early development of the trigeminal system (Humphrey, 1964) and somatosensory thalamic connections (Kostovic & Rakic, 1990) compared to visual pathways.
Warzone
What evidence suggests an innate component to bodily self-awareness?
In adults
The “phantom limb effect” in amputees, where they still feel sensations in their missing limb, suggests pre-existing neural representations of the body in the somatosensory cortex. This effect is often stronger if the limb loss occurred after a longer period of having the limb (Simmel, 1966).
What evidence suggests an innate component to bodily self-awareness in newborns?
1) Hand-mouth coordination:
**Butterworth & Hopkins (1988) **observed newborns anticipating the arrival of their hand at their mouth, suggesting an innate postural schema. However, the influence of the prenatal environment needs consideration.
2) Rooting response:
While initially suggested that newborns differentiate between touch and self-touch during rooting (important for feeding), this finding has been difficult to consistently replicate.
3) **Somatotopy: **
The presence of rudimentary somatotopic maps in infant brains, similar to adult organization, suggests an inherent blueprint for body representation.
4) Visual-tactile correspondence:
Filippetti et al. (2013) found that newborns look longer at a video of their face being stroked synchronously with a tactile sensation on their own cheek, but not when asynchronous or with an inverted face, indicating an early sensitivity to multisensory body perception.
Shemima
How does the development of visual-tactile localization enhance infant understanding of the bodily self?
Studies on visual-tactile co-localization show that 4- and 6-month-old infants can locate a touch on their hand or foot when presented with a simultaneous visual cue.
**Begum Ali et al. (2015) **
Visual-tactile co-localization studies show both 4- and 6-month-olds can generally locate touch when seen.
However, 6-month-olds’ accuracy decreases with crossed feet, unlike 4-month-olds.
This suggests that between 4-6 months, infants develop a more sophisticated, posture-sensitive awareness of their body’s spatial arrangement by better integrating visual and tactile cues.
What does research suggest about infants’ perception of audiotactile co-location?
This is when infants link sounds and touch in space.
Studies on 6-month-old infants show they look significantly longer at incongruent audiotactile stimuli (e.g., feeling a vibration on one hand while hearing a sound near the other) compared to congruent stimuli (feeling and hearing on the same side). This
What are the limitations of studying body representations at birth?
- **Imitation ** doubts about the strength of evidence for active intermodal mapping at birth (e.g., Ooestenbroek et al., 2016)
- **Hand-mouth coordination and self touch ** Good evidence for hand-mouth coordination but it is unclear whether this is anything more than a very limited motor schema at birth
- **Early somatotopy ** There is good evidence for somatotopy at birth and before, but it is unclear as to the extent that this can support body representations
- Multisensory body representations There is quite strong evidence for early developing multisensory body representations, and this is perhaps the closest to an indication of “innate” body representations. Still limitations in body representations in early infancy which we have to consider..
According to Piaget’s constructionism, how does a sense of self develop?
- Piaget’s constructionism suggests that a sense of self isn’t innate but rather develops through learning.
- Initially, infants possess innate schemas (basic frameworks for understanding the world). Through experiences and interactions, they gradually develop a sense of their own body and self.
mind body + tactile
What do the studies indicate about the early development of body awareness in infants?
**D’souza et al.’s (2017) **observation of a baby shaking their legs while shaking a rattle suggests that early on, the mind-body connection isn’t finely tuned.
Bremner et al.’s (2009) study on tactile localization showed that young infants (6.5-month-olds) struggle to visually locate touch on their hands, with manual responses preceding visual ones. This highlights that coordinating different sensory systems to build a cohesive body representation takes time, improving significantly by 10 months.
How does body representation develop?
**Rigato et al.’s (2014) **research using somatosensory evoked potentials (sEPs) demonstrated a significant difference between 6.5-month-olds and 10-month-olds in their ability to distinguish between touch applied in normal and crossed postures.
This indicates that the neural basis for postural remapping of touch, a crucial aspect of body representation, develops within the first year, coinciding with the emergence of reaching across the midline.
What is the rubber hand illusion?
The rubber hand illusion (RHI) is a phenomenon where children demonstrated a stronger experience of it than adults.
Interestingly, while reliance on the sense of their body’s position (proprioceptive cues) for their hand increased with age, the feeling of ownership and touch on the fake hand was the same across all ages.
What is the full body illusion?
The full body illusion (FBI) involves a setup with a camera on one side of a room, the participant’s real body, and a virtual body (a screen showing themselves).
Participants are then asked to move in different directions.
Younger children under 8 found it difficult to navigate this setup (an egocentric task) compared to older children and adults.
Notably, even if participants didn’t know their physical location, they could still navigate.
What are the contrasting perspectives of “differentiation” and “integration” in the context of perceptual development and the sense of self?
Both differentiation and integration offer ways to understand perceptual development.
Integration describes the process of learning to link individual perceptual features together to form a coherent perception of objects, events, people, and the self.
Conversely, differentiation suggests that we initially perceive wholes (like entire bodies or selves) and then gradually learn to distinguish finer levels of sensory details within those wholes.
