title: Distinguishing three levels in explicit self-awareness.
abstract: This paper focuses on the development of explicit self-awareness in children. Mirror self-recognition has been the most popular paradigm used to assess this ability in children. Nevertheless, according to Rochat (2003), there are, at least, three different levels of explicit self-awareness. We therefore designed three different self-recognition tasks, each corresponding to one of these levels (a mirror self-recognition task, a picture self-recognition task and a masked self-recognition task). We observed a decrease in performance across the three tasks. This supports a developmental scale in self-awareness. Besides, the masked self-recognition performance makes it possible to assess the final and the most sophisticated level of self-awareness, i.e. the external self. To our best knowledge, this task is the first attempt to evaluate the external self in preverbal children. Our results indicate that 22-month old children show awareness of their external self or, at least, that this ability is in the process of being acquired.
authors.affiliation: Université Libre de Bruxelles, Avenue FD Roosevelt, 50 (CP191), 1050 Brussels, Belgium. laure.legrain@ulb.ac.be
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Legrain
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Cleeremans
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Destrebecqz
mesh_terms: D001364:Awareness; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D012649:Self Concept