In a follow-up study published in a 1998 issue of Developmental Psychology, Povinelli and his research colleague Bridget Simon used nearly the identical procedure, but this time the study included five-year-olds and also included a seven-day comparison condition. That meant that, for half of the children, the time duration between the covert sticker-marking event and the video playback was a full week. In this study, 88 three- to five-year-old children were randomly assigned to either the brief delay (3 min) or the extended delay (7 days) condition. Similar to the results from the earlier study, less than half of the three-year-olds responded by reaching up to their heads regardless of the length of time that separated the two events. In contrast, nearly all of the four- and five-year-olds in the brief condition did so, and furthermore their same-age peers in the extreme delay condition did not. “That is,” the authors write regarding the delayed condition findings, “as age increased, the number of children who reached up tended to decrease…. Four- and especially five-year-olds displayed a clear understanding that although briefly delayed visual feedback is causally relevant to transient aspects of the present self, extremely delayed feedback is not.”
Povinelli has pointed out the relevancy of these findings to the phenomenon of “infantile amnesia,” which tidily sums up the curious case of most people being unable to recall events from their first three years of life. (I spent my first three years in New Jersey, but for all I know I could have spontaneously appeared as a four-year-old in my parent’s bedroom in Virginia, which is where I have my first memory.) Although the precise neurocognitive mechanisms underlying infantile amnesia are still not very well-understood, escaping such a state of the perpetual present would indeed seemingly require a sense of the temporally enduring, autobiographical self.
In this column presented by Scientific American Mind magazine, research psychologist Jesse Bering of Queen's University Belfast ponders some of the more obscure aspects of everyday human behavior. Ever wonder why yawning is contagious, why we point with our index fingers instead of our thumbs or whether being breastfed as an infant influences your sexual preferences as an adult? Get a closer look at the latest data as “Bering in Mind” tackles these and other quirky questions about human nature. Sign up for the RSS feed or friend Dr. Bering on Facebook and never miss an installment again.
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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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