Emerging Self-Representation Presents a Challenge for Perspective Tracking in Infancy

Resumen

The capacity to track another’s perspective is present from early in life, with young infants ostensibly able to predict others’ behaviour even when the self and other perspective are at odds. Yet, infants’ abilities are difficult to reconcile with the well-documented challenge that older children face when they need to ignore their own perspective. Here we provide evidence that it is the emergence of self-representation, from around 18 months, that likely creates a perspective conflict between self and other. Using mirror self-recognition as a measure of self-awareness and pupil dilation to index conflict processing, our results show that mirror recognisers perceive greater conflict than non-recognisers when viewing a scenario in which the self and other have divergent perspectives, specifically when the conflict between self and other is salient. These results suggest that infants’ perspective tracking abilities may benefit from an initial absence of self-representation.

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Cómo citar (APA 7)

Yeung, E., Askitis, D., Manea, V., & Southgate, V. (2022). Emerging Self-Representation Presents a Challenge for Perspective Tracking in Infancy. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/tv2kb