Jesse Bering
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The Wisdom of Psychopaths
In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a...
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Last week I found myself in a web video dialogue on Bloggingheads.tv. This is a sort of video blogging website sponsored by the New York Times where the two participants are meant to rally big ideas back and forth, or at least get a decent dialogue going about the topic at hand. I spoke with (soon-to-be) Yale philosopher Joshua Knobe on bloggingheads.tv on the natural foundations of religion. Our discussion was the first of a John F. Templeton Foundation series called Percontations, a term defined as “questionings or inquiries, especially those requiring more than a yes or no answer.” In the present context, this inquiry presumably concerns the achingly dull question over whether or not God exists.
The recording format for Bloggingheads is quite odd, as the two discussants are conversing over the phone (usually wearing an embarrassing headphone) while recording their own video images using the QuickTime Pro software program. The editors then splice the two videos together so it creates the impression, at least, that the two individuals can actually see each other throughout the conversation. But in reality it’s more like staring into a mirror while chatting over the phone. Anyway, when it finally went up online and I sat down to watch the first few minutes, it was a stranger experience than I’d anticipated. For one, I think I can safely say that this was the first time I’d ever watched myself watching myself having a conversation. The fact that I continually averted my own gaze throughout the video is revealing; I often fail to make eye contact with other people—a habit a Belgian colleague of mine once told me was quite rude—but I didn’t realize I’d even treat myself so disrespectfully. I also didn’t realize that I had such a gargantuan forehead and that I used the words “essentially” and “basically” in nearly every sentence, so I’ll have to work on that.
The whole experience reminded me of a series of experiments conducted some years ago by University of Louisiana at Lafayette cognitive scientist Daniel Povinelli. Povinelli and his colleagues were interested in pinpointing the exact age at which children develop an autobiographical sense of self. Although children first begin to “recognize” themselves in mirrors between the ages of 18-24 months of age, Povinelli points out that this fact does not mean that children at this age possess a rich, subjective understanding of the self.
Given infants’ extensive familiarity with mirrors prior to 18 months, it is likely that they are already familiar with the constellation of features that comprise their facial appearance. Thus, the ability to correctly label the image may only reflect the fact that the infant knows that the particular constellation of features he or she sees in mirrors are referred to by the infant’s proper name, or the personal pronoun “me.”
Even once children do understand that the image represents the self as a subjective entity (allowing him or her to attribute first-order, private psychological experiences to the person reflected in the mirror), this doesn’t necessarily mean that they have an autobiographical sense of self. That is to say, a self that endures through time or, in the psychologist William James’s words, an understanding that “I am the same self I was yesterday.” Rather, it could be the case that young children’s minds—lucky them—are locked into a sort of here-and-now existence, one where antecedent events fail to clearly connect with the circumstances of the present. To get at this idea, Povinelli and his colleagues developed a rather clever series of experiments where children are videotaped playing a game in the laboratory and then shown the video footage a short time later. But, and here’s the clever part, during the course of the videotaping, one of the experimenters pats the child’s head in praise and in so doing surreptitiously places a large, brightly colored sticker on their head. (This was preceded by a sticker-less “sham pat” where children were simply accustomed to being patted on the head.) Although there were a number of hypotheses tested, the critical research question was whether upon seeing the previously recorded footage, children of different ages would be more or less inclined to reach up and touch their head. If they did so, this would indicate their general understanding that their past is causally bound to their present.
In the first study to use this general paradigm, published in the journal Child Development in 1996, Povinelli and his colleagues Keli Landau and Helen Perilloux reported that none of the two-year-olds and only 25 percent of three-year-olds reached up to touch their heads when the videotape was played back to them after a three-minute delay. In contrast, 75 percent of the study’s four-year-olds did so. These same age-related patterns were replicated in a similar study where, rather than watching themselves on delayed videotape playback, children were shown Polaroid images of the experimenter marking them with the sticker. Yet although they largely failed to connect the past with the present by reaching up to touch the sticker, nearly all of the three-year-olds in the study accurately identified themselves when asked who was shown in the image. Interestingly, however, the authors found that the three-year-olds were significantly more likely to refer to themselves in the third person (using their first names rather and saying that the sticker is on “his” or “her” head) than were the four-year-olds, who used first-person pronouns (“me” and “my head”) almost exclusively.
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7 Comments
Add CommentHello! I'm interest in this article. I'm planning to interprete it into Chinese for our small booklet restricted for association members only. I hope to recieve your permit. Thank you!
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's easy to make comments, but hard to stop e-mails from sciam. I can't seem to find preferences where to stop receiving comment updates.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSeems the children merely -touched their head cause that's where they themselves had the sticker and were reminded or that spot on the head and then re-noticed it. As I understand -the sticker was still on the tots. this means the tot knows he has a sticker on his head when he sees someone with a sticker on hi head -not that he is a person or something other than what he sees in a mirror.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf they didn't still have the stickers on their little heads, i apologize -though having a sticker removed from your head would be just like you great aunt's hairy-mustache-slobbery kiss. Or my fathers for that matter. Ig! which you certainly would remember for sometime. Not a continuity of Identity thing. though when reminded you might have a repeat of a queezy feeling you felt at the time.
But that is memory , Not self-consciousness. and as I tell my Dad -"That's Not ME, Dad"
Share hands! Same feeling.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt would be interesting to know if the development of very young children's sense of self correlates with their acquisition of language, as it happens to be so that very few -- if any -- have any memories from the time before they learned how to speak. It would be interesting in the sense of knowing whether children who speak earlier than their peers also are more likely to break out of their here-and-now perception of time than are their age mates, suggesting that it is a result of the development of greater structural complexity in the brain.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy first memories are from when I was three years old, and according to my parents this was also when I started to speak coherently and with somewhat correct grammar. My sister, on the other hand, claims that her first memory is from her first birthday, which I do not doubt considering how that was about the time when she started to speak.
What is interesting to note is that my sister understands languages in a way that I never will, whilst I understand other subjects -- such as math -- much better, suggesting that our brains are organised in different ways. In a sense, her brain could be considered to be more female than mine, according to recent research.
I believe it is so that children with autism have been shown to have fewer mirror-neurons and more male brains -- among other things -- than do children without autism, meaning that autistic children should have a harder time recognising themselves in a picture, suggesting that the development of a sense of self is correlated with the maturation of empathy as a way to see the world; to be able to emphasise with that the child in the picture indeed is oneself, (empathy -- as I am more than certain that you already know -- being a female trait (and if I recall correctly also stemming from the function of mirror-neurons)).
All in all, your article was a great one, and as always one focusing upon a most interesting matter. Keep them coming.
Perhaps it is linked to a childs survival being reliant on the now. Maybe the cognitive awareness being focused in the present actually is in nature to the childs advantage.*
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