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

Abstract

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.

The origins and emergence of self-representation

“…This different demands of 'high' and 'low' conflict manipulations like this for inhibition are also documented in adults (Samson et al, 2005) and young children (Koós et al, 1997). In a second study, infants who show MSR also showed an increase in blood oxygenation in the right prefrontal cortex while observing these events whereas infants who did not show MSR did not (Yeung et al, 2024). Together, these data suggest that infants who have achieved MSR may experience a conflict between self and other perspective (as evidenced by greater pupil dilation and activation of frontal brain regions) that is not apparent in infants before MSR.…”

Altercentric bias in preverbal infants memory

“…Drawing on a large body of work suggesting that self-representation emerges around 18 months (Amsterdam, 1972;Anderson, 1984;Bulgarelli et al, 2019), it is proposed that a key feature of early development that fosters an altercentric bias is the initial absence of self-representation. Prior to the emergence of self-representation, young children experience less conflict when self and other perspectives diverge (Yeung et al, 2022), and, it is proposed that the absence of a distinct self-representation is associated with a relatively weaker memory for events that the infant sees alone than events that are cued by others' attention. In the context of the classic task of competing perspectives, the false belief task, in which the infant sees an agent observing an object in one location followed by the object moving to a second location in the agent's absence, the altercentric hypothesis proposes that the first event will be encoded and remembered better than the second (Southgate, 2020).…”