Developmental Roots of Human Self-consciousness

Abstract

Human consciousness is considered in the perspective of early development. Infants and young children remind us that at its core, the problem of consciousness is primarily a problem of identity, in particular a problem of self-identity with others in mind. It is about how we feel and construe ourselves as an entity among other entities. It is about becoming co-conscious: Aware of oneself through the evaluative eyes of others. This development unfolds in the first 18 months of life, following major steps that are described, and arguably considered as a human trademark.

INTRODUCTION

In light of recent progress in machine learning, the thought that we may be interchangeable with clever machines is profoundly unsettling. It challenges our elusive sense of autonomy and authenticity, qua who we are as sentient, self-reflective entities. However, why is it so? I want to suggest that it is primarily because of self-consciousness, a unique feature of our species that children develop in the first 2 years of their life.

DEVELOPMENTAL PITCH

From a developmental perspective, infants and young children tell us that at its core, the problem of consciousness is a problem of identity, in particular self-identity. It is about how we feel and construe ourselves as an entity among other entities. Infants and children in their development tell us that it is primarily how one knows and evaluates oneself in relation to others. In this view, the primordial meaning of human consciousness fits better the ancient Greek etymology of suneidesis, translation of the word consciousness, which literally means “knowledge with.” That contrasts with the more modern Latin meaning of consciousness (con-scientia), which literally means “with knowledge,” a meaning that is more fitting of the solipsistic, “cogito,” and egological meaning of consciousness that Descartes famously introduced at the threshold of the 18th century Enlightenment. Arguably, the Cartesian meaning of consciousness (with knowledge) continues to prevail in the current neuroscientific studies of consciousness, in spite of what babies tell us in their development.

My goal here is to show that infants develop not just to become “with knowledge” alone, but to become first and foremost “co-conscious” of what it is like to be, with others in mind (Rochat, 2009). In the context of the particularly prolonged period of immaturity that characterizes human ontogeny (see Trevarthan, 1987; Gould, 1977; Montagu, 1961), infants develop species-specific propensities toward an awareness of self through the evaluative eyes of others (Rochat, 2009). If human consciousness evolved to become distinctively symbolic (Deacon, 1997), cooperative (Henrich & Muthukrishna, 2021; Tomasello, 2009), or endowed with episodic (Donald, 1993) as well as autonoetic memory systems (Tulving, 1985), it also evolved to become self-reflecting and co-determined by others' evaluation (Rochat, 2018).

HUMAN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS

In his book on The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872, p. 309) Darwin notes, “Blushing is the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions.” This observation is seminal if we want to understand human consciousness, in particular human self-consciousness, which is arguably and, as proposed here, a unique feature of our species.

A few pages later (p. 325), Darwin adds: “It is not the simple act of reflecting on our own appearance, but the thinking what others think of us, which excites a blush. In absolute solitude the most sensitive person would be quite indifferent about his appearance.” Darwin notes finally “…We feel blame or disapprobation more acutely than approbation; and consequently depreciatory remarks or ridicule, whether of our appearance or conduct, causes us to blush much more readily than does praise” (ibid p. 325).

Darwin's observation is a good starting point to figure the specificity of human consciousness, here viewed as a unique “symbolic,” albeit embodied, meta-awareness of self in relation to others. Typical children develop and start expressing unambiguously by the middle of the second year. They do so following necessary yet not sufficient, precursor signs that can be traced back to birth, and even prior to birth in the primal context of maternal–fetal active co-regulations during gestation (Quintero & De Jaegher, 2020).

As a species, we have indeed evolved the uncanny ability to reflect upon ourselves as an object not only of reflection but also of evaluation. A trademark of being human is that we constantly compare, monitor, and evaluate ourselves in relation to others. To some extent, one could argue that such activities are intrinsic parts of group living, thus shared with any other social species, except that our symbolic species brought it to incomparable levels of complexity.

As a case in point, are we not the only species that put make up on and cannot help taking selfies? To be human is indeed to care about reputation, our own reputation, and the reputation of whom we identify with, in other words whoever we consider as our “in-group.” Reputation comes from the Latin verb putare, which means to calculate, and it is a truism to say that much of what we do is to impress others and, in the same token, to impress ourselves, constantly gaging and monitoring our social affiliation, ultimately trying to boost our self-esteem, gaining comfort and assurance in relation to others. The fear of social rejection is the mother of all human fears.

For better or for worse, we do have the uncanny propensity to compute the degree of our social affiliation and self-worth through the evaluative eyes of others, how we may be perceived in general (i.e., not just visually; see Ciaunica, 2019), and ultimately more or less favorably gauged by others. This is what we may construe as the psychological underpinning of human self-consciousness.

ORIGINS

When and how do young children start to care about their own reputation by not only blushing as mentioned by Darwin, but also by lying; by expressing pride, guilt, or shame; and by expressing all the various, often complex forms of social embarrassment and social feelings that are the trademark of human adult self-conscious psychology?

In typical development, it appears that the first unambiguous signs of self-consciousness in human ontogeny can be safely posited as emerging by the middle of the second year. From 18 months of age, on average, infants will start selectively and systematically modifying their behavior to please an adult, displaying unambiguous audience effects. As an illustration, if an experimenter expressed negative emotions toward the movement of a robot she activates with a particular remote apparatus, subsequently the infant will be less prone to use this remote in front of the experimenter if she is looking on toward the child (Botto & Rochat, 2018). However, when the experimenter turns her back, the child will grab the remote to explore the effect it has on the robot. In multiple control experiments, we did find a systematic audience effect in 14- to 24-month-old infants (Botto & Rochat, ibid).

Likewise, it is also at around the same age (middle of the second year) that children start passing the mirror mark test, discovering and reaching directly toward a mark that was surreptitiously placed on their forehead (Lewis & Ramsay, 2004; see Figure 1).

Figure 1. .

Two year-old Samoan child passing the mirror mark test by reaching directly toward the mark placed surreptitiously on his forehead before testing (photo by P. Rochat).

However, when children start to pass the mirror mark test, they do so differently whether they are the only one marked, or all adults surrounding the child during the test are also wearing a yellow sticker mark on their forehead (Rochat, Broesch, & Jayne, 2012). When the mark is the social norm, children from 18 months will pass the test by touching the mark directly on their forehead, and not in the mirror, noticing it in the mirror, but rather than remove it, they will tend to either put it back on their forehead or just touch it while leaving it there.

When children pass the mirror mark test, they do so not only by directly touching the mark they discover on their face but also typically with accompanying expressions of embarrassment (Amsterdam, 1972), like the little Samoan girl of less than 24 months (see Figure 2) who passes the mark test but also showing unmistakable embarrassment by hiding her face from the mirror reflection.

Figure 2. .

An 18-month-old Samoan girl showing embarrassment and hiding her face as she passes the mirror mark test by reaching directly toward the mark placed surreptitiously on her forehead before testing (photo by P. Rochat).

On the basis of multiple reliable observations across studies, we can safely conclude that when children start recognizing themselves in the mirror by passing the mark test, they not only do so from a first-person, “Cartesian” solipsistic way. In other words, what they start recognizing in the mirror is not just themselves for themselves. Because of their embarrassment, they also start to construe their own specular image as the image they project onto the social world. What they see is not a private, but rather a public self: what others may see of themselves and eventually evaluate, all of it guided by the need to manage and project a good impression onto others to bolster social affiliation. Why otherwise would they display embarrassment as they recognize themselves with an unexpected mark on their face? Why would not they express amusement and positive surprise? A legitimate question is why children by 18 months tend immediately to get rid of the mark they discover on their face, and why are they inclined to put it back on their face when people around them are wearing the same mark?

In short, based on these sampled observations, among many others that exist now in the developmental literature, it is safe to say that, in typical human development, the first signs of unambiguous self-image management and the very human propensity to cultivate positive impressions in others emerge by the middle of the second year. That may be the root and first manifestation of the human care for reputation that can be posited as a major trademark of our self-conscious and symbolic species.

Concomitantly, it is also by their second birthday that children start to engage in lying, intentionally concealing a true state of affair to avoid potential reprimands from an adult (Rochat & Guo, 2021). In all, it is by the middle of their second year that children start to compute and act upon what others may think of them to generate positive impressions, branding themselves. They become reputable, co-conscious about themselves, hence self-conscious in the vernacular English sense of the word.

From a developmental perspective, the question is of course what might explain and prepare the human child to express what Darwin saw in his own child, namely, the unique self-conscious trait of our species that arguably could account for much of human uniqueness: the human propensity to collaborate, to engage in joint intentionality and other sophisticated mentalizing, including empathy and moral ethics.

All these human traits may be explained, at least in part, by the human care for reputation and accompanying co-consciousness emerging predictably in typical development from around 18 months of age. This raises the question of what may be the necessary precursors of such unique human development.

PRENATAL ORIGINS OF SUBJECTIVITY

The past 50 years of infancy research has debunked the well-entrenched pioneer idea that we would be born in an a-dualist state of confusion with the environment (Piaget, 1952; Freud, 1905; James, 1890). We now know that the starting state of human development is not fundamentally disorganized and not just reflexive or automatic. Furthermore, it is reasonable to think that subjective experience emerges and is manifested in utero, at least by the third trimester of gestation. Multiple studies demonstrate that the human fetus learns the valence of particular odors in utero, demonstrating olfactory discrimination and preference for familiar odors and tastes immediately after birth (see Tristão et al., 2021, for an extent review of the experimental literature). Behaviors observed immediately after birth and until the second month postpartum are already observable in fetuses. There is indeed an unmistakable and well-established continuity between pre- and postnatal behavioral development (Prechtl, 1984). This is made clear on the basis of 4-D ultrasonic imaging technology allowing clear observation of behavior in the womb (Hata, Dai, & Marumo, 2010), such as the images in Figure 3: in A, a 30-week-old fetus expressing positive valence in smiling; B, complex hand–mouth coordination, the mouth opening in anticipation of manual contact; and C, a behavior that is remarkably homologous to what is observed in newborns (Rochat, Blass, & Hoffmeyer, 1988).

Figure 3. .

(A) A 30-week-old fetus expressing positive valence in smiling; (B) a, b, and c expression of complex hand–mouth coordination in a 33-week-old fetus, the mouth opening in anticipation of manual contact (Photos by Toshiyuki Hata, reproduced with permission); (C) homologous hand–mouth coordination observed in a newborn minutes after birth (photos by P. Rochat).

The continuity of pre- and postnatal behavioral development is not trivial as it puts into question the starting point of psychology, which is typically superimposed to the biological birth of the child, with the severance of the umbilical cord that signals with a sudden fateful cut the precise starting point of the child's autonomous being. However, we now know that fetuses learn in the womb, preferring immediately after birth to orient toward their mother's amniotic fluid smell (Marlier, Schaal, & Soussignan, 1998a, 1998b) and discriminating their own mother's voice from the voice of a stranger reading an identical text with comparable prosody (DeCasper, Lecanuet, Busnel, Granier-Deferre, & Maugeais, 1994; DeCasper & Fifer, 1980). These pioneer findings clearly push the starting state of psychology way back in the womb, and not at birth.

Until fairly recently, it was common to deny any experience of pain to infants. Up to the 1960s, curare injection kept infants still with muscular paralysis during surgery like hernias. This procedure left the infant awake with pain. It is also only recently that it is routine to provide newborns with sucrose to calm infants before circumcision, boosting their endorphin system and as a form of anesthesia (Blass & Hoffmeyer, 1991). There is indeed good reason to posit that pain experience is most likely present in fetuses as young as 30 weeks, with all necessary underlying cerebral systems formed and responding to painful stimulations (Anand & Hickey, 1987). Externalized human fetuses show instinctive behavioral avoidance via bodily refraction in response to a needle prick (Hooker, 1952). The zeitgeist of a painless, hence experience-less fetus, has been clearly revoked in light of current generalized practice of heart rate monitoring of the unborn child as an index of pain in the course of vaginal delivery. Pain in the fetus is now fully recognized with strict criteria dictating decisions to perform caesarian section.

In all, we now recognize that the root of subjectivity is in the womb (Rochat, 2011). The beginning of psychology has to be construed in relation to the complex epigenesis of fetuses, in the confine of the maternal womb and in interaction with their carrying mother. The rapidly developing multisensory experience that is expressed in the womb from about 20 weeks of gestation (halfway) is what would amount to the starting core of human subjectivity. It can also reasonably be construed as the ontogenetic origins of psychology, fetuses from this age behaving as sentient actors, manifesting and learning from the rich multisensory experience of their own body (i.e., see Figure 1C above).

STARTING STATE OF SELF-AWARENESS

At birth, infants are not in a state of fusion with the environment, that is, not the state of a-dualism described in earlier views on the starting state of human affective, perceptual, and cognitive development (Piaget, 1952; Freud, 1905). Babies are not just born the blooming, buzzing confusion famously proposed by Willam James (1890). Within hours of their birth, term newborns show discrimination between single and double touch, rooting significantly more toward someone's finger touching their cheek (single-touch stimulation) when compared with instances of their own hand touching their cheek. They show discrimination between single- and double-touch stimulation (Rochat & Hespos, 1997). This simple observation supports the idea that from birth, infants differentiate what pertains and belong to themselves and what originates and belong to an outside world populated by people and things. The starting state of the infant is not a confusion and a disorganization, but rather a perception that shows signs of being objectified and organized. Furthermore, infants from the get-go show signs that they perceive themselves as an embodied entity among other entities. By 2 months, the evidence is even clearer, infants providing further demonstration of such differentiation. Placed in a stationary infant seat, they adjust themselves with a forward or backward body posture in response to peripheral optical flows specifying either forward or backward acceleration (Jouen & Gapenne, 1995). As suggested by James J. Gibson (1979), perception entails “co-perceiving oneself.” Perception of events and things in the world is inseparable from perceiving oneself as a perceiver of such events and things. This applies to newborns in their earliest perception, to the extent that they do not just sense the world but from the start perceive it, as rudimentary their visual perception might be at birth, with rapid development by 2 months (Maurer & Lewis, 1979), and in particular of acuity and depth cues in the first 6 months postnatal (Kellman & Arterberry, 2006; Kellman & Banks, 1998).

Newborns and even fetuses demonstrate particular attunement to faces and their canonical orientation (two eyes, nose, and mouth from top to bottom). Immediately after birth, newborns prefer to track schematized right-side-up, face-like displays (Johnson, Dziurawiec, Ellis, & Morton, 1991). In a more recent study, even fetuses by the end of gestation are reported to visually track three dots of lights projected through their mother's abdomen only when these lights are in a face-like canonical orientation. Tracking response of the fetus is significantly reduced when the three dots of light are inverted in their orientation from the fetus' vantage point (Reid et al., 2017). A more recent study (Reissland, Wood, Einbeck, & Lane, 2020), controlling for maternal health and fetal growth, does provide further evidence that human fetuses (33 weeks gestation) react differently to face-like compared with non-face-like (stripe) configurations. Discriminatory responses of the fetuses are shown to depend on both their physiological growth and the mental health of their mother (anxiety and depression; Reissland et al., ibid). This latter finding upholds the fundamental co-embodiment and co-homeostasis of the fetus with their mother (Ciaunica, Constant, Preissl, & Fotopoulou, 2021).

If fetuses and newborns appear to be attuned to organized face-like patterns of visual stimulation, even more remarkable is the fact that from birth on, infants do show a significant preference for static faces that look straight at them as opposed to faces with an averted gaze (Farroni, Csibra, Simion, & Johnson, 2002). This shows that not only faces form a built-in visual attractor for newborns, but also that the quality of the face in relation to the newborn, is a determinant of their visual attention. It appears that there may be also an innate attunement and discrimination of the presence or absence of eye-to-eye contact with an attending face. It indicates that infants are born equipped with the detection and preference for specific facial patterns of co-perception (i.e., pupil to pupil contact with face) that is a cardinal signal of the indispensable care they need to survive. Infants are indeed born with the rudimentary ability to tap into social resources (food and care) on which their survival depends. They are born organized and aware, not just sentient or capable of transducing stimulus energy into neural firing patterns. Perception and action of the fetus during the last trimester of pregnancy and during the first 2 months of life is organized in relation to particular features, information, and resources in the environment.

In all, the starting state of the newborns is not a blooming, buzzing confusion but rather an awareness and active preparation (as rudimentary and in need of development they might be) to tap into the primal resources of energy and care to which infants depend on to survive. Newborns do come to the world endowed with remarkable built-in perception and action systems evolved by the species. Infant studies continue to unpack this evolutionary endowment and inheritance of the human child with the question of how such evolutionary endowment may channel early subjectivity and its development. In other words, what characterizes the infant's developing subjective and intersubjective experience beyond birth?

TWO-MONTH REVOLUTION: CONTEMPLATIVE STANCE AND BECOMING AGENT

There is a confluence of major postnatal behavioral changes emerging from around 6 weeks of age. Infants tend to spend significantly less time sleeping, spending longer bouts of wakeful time in an alert and attentive behavioral state, perceiving and acting in the world (Wolff, 1987). This marked behavioral change corresponds to what we may describe as the emergence of a novel contemplative awareness toward self and world, what would amount to a novel contemplative stance (Rochat, 2001, 2009). This new stance contrasts with the relative lethargy and sluggishness of newborns in the first few weeks of postnatal life, a period marked primarily by phases of feeding and sleeping. Although feeding and sleeping remains central to their lives, by the second month, infants start manifesting themselves as explicit explorers and active scrutinizers of their world, including the world outside their body. They become explicit agents of their own perceptions.

Unlike newborns, 2-month-olds introduced with a musical pacifier in their mouth will not only be inclined to learn within minutes how to produce sounds by applying positive pressures on it, but they will also, literally within seconds, tend to systematically modify their sucking on the pacifier depending on whether the frequency variation of the sound they produce is either commensurate (analog) or noncommensurate (i.e., non-analog or random) to their oral pressure on the pacifier. From 2 months of age, infants suck with markedly different amplitude and frequency depending on whether the sound they produce is analog or non-analog of their oral-tactile and proprioceptive activity on the pacifier (Rochat & Striano, 1999). In contrast to newborns, they become explicit agents and explorers of their own perceptions, starting to show systematic and deliberate self-exploration.

Probably the most striking and universal index of the 2-month revolution in human ontogeny is the concomitant emergence of socially elicited smiling. If newborns express positive emotions via reflex smiles that predictably follow a good feed associated with sugar-triggered endorphin production, something fundamentally changes in smile production from approximately 6 weeks of age. By the second month, infants start smiling in response to people interacting with them in face-to-face interactions, a new category of socially elicited smiling. This emergence is documented to be universal, evidenced across highly contrasted cultures and parenting environments (e.g., Broesch, Rochat, Olah, Broesch, & Henrich, 2016; Bakeman, Adamson, Konner, & Barr, 1997). From this point on, parents typically report discovering the person behind their infant in bouts of shared experiences in what is coined as primary intersubjectivity (Trevarthen, 1979).

In addition to being attracted to faces from birth (Johnson et al., 1991), by 2 months, infants start to engage in emotional dialogue or face-to-face protoconversation with others, taking turns in organized communicative bids. They become attuned and sensitive to the timing and organization of face-to-face exchanges initiated by adults. The most reliable index of such sensitivity is the predictable expression of negative emotions and gaze avoidance that infants starting at 2 months manifest when their social partner engages in a sudden still face, suddenly interrupting the flow of exchanges (Tronick, Als, Adamson, Wise, & Brazelton, 1978). In the most explicit fashion, infants start to express how others are expected to respond to them in a timely and attuned manner. They frown, avoiding the other's gaze and eventually cry when other's lack affective attunement or become less contingent in their responses toward them (Murray & Trevarthen, 1986). From 2 months of age, infants build social expectations (Nadel, Carchon, Kervella, Marcelli, & Réserbat-Plantey, 1999). In addition to taking a contemplative stance toward themselves and the physical world, they also become social agents in the context of dyadic face-to-face exchanges.

NINE-MONTH REVOLUTION: JOINT ENGAGEMENT AND CO-AWARENESS

By 9 months, infants breakaway from primary face-to-face exchanges to triangulate with interacting partners in reference to physical objects. They start to express and initiate bouts of joint attention with others, starting to point to things in unmistakable attempts to capture and control the attention of others (Carpenter & Liebal, 2012; Striano & Rochat, 1999). This marks a crucial psychological change, hence a second revolution in the psychological development of the infant. It is at this juncture that infants tend to become explicitly referential in their communication. It is the dawn of symbolic functioning and ultimately language. As supporting, albeit indirect evidence, research shows that the amount of joint initiatives of the infant at 9 months is predictive of the pace and level of the infant's linguistic and vocabulary development by the third year of life (Tomasello & Farrar, 1986).

At around the time infants begin to engage in bouts of joint attention, they also start to be weary of strangers with what Spitz (1950) first described and coined as the “Eighth’s month anxiety.” Interestingly, it is also from this age on that infants discover new effectiveness of their own body associated with quantum independence. It is the time of the sudden emergence of self-locomotion enabling the infant for the first time to explore the environment on all fours, away from the secure base of caretakers. The developmental co-emergence of joint attention, stranger anxiety, and first independent locomotion is not coincidental. It is the trademark of the 9-month-old's revolution, which, at a motivational level, resolves a major conundrum: maintaining proximity to care while responding to the irresistible call to roam the world and experience new degrees of behavioral freedom. The infant may find resolution to this basic conundrum (a life span human conundrum) by capturing and bringing with them the attention of others in their independent foray into their surrounding world. In such context, stranger anxiety may also be a concomitant renewed need for exclusivity and reassurance as they venture out, separating themselves from the secure base of their familiar caretaker (Rochat, 2009). Noticeably, and rarely considered together, is the fact that early in development and before 8 months that marks the emergence of radically new behavioral freedom, infants do not tend to show weariness when passed from arms to arms. By 8–9 months, however, this social confidence fades. They start to show weariness while being carried around by unfamiliar adults. At the same time, they also start to engage in joint attention and develop secondary intersubjectivity: the sharing of experience with others in reference to themselves and their own attention to objects in the environment. Thus, infants starting to roam the world independently will now try to carry with them the attention of others from which they separate. Joint attention is indeed a way for infants to resolve their separation conundrum by engaging and maintaining contact at a distance with caretakers. In short, they may resolve this basic conundrum by ways of checking and telecontrolling their attention while enticed and newly capable of roaming their surrounding with new degrees of behavioral freedom.

FOURTEEN MONTHS REVOLUTION: SELF-PROJECTION AND IDENTIFICATION

After the first birthday, another major developmental step occurs. It is a step toward the awareness of self and others as mutually reflective intentional agents. It is the first sign of the child's realization of others as self-reflection, the discovery of what has been coined the “looking glass self” (Cooley, 1983). If before the 9-month-old transition (see above), the child manifests first discrimination of being imitated via paying more attention to an adult imitating them, it is by 14 months that they start to probe and attempt to trick an adult imitating their own action in face-to-face exchanges (Agnetta & Rochat, 2004). From this age on, children show a systematic discrimination between an imitating person and an imitating physical object. Specifically, they start paying significantly more attention to a person reproducing faithfully what they do on the same object, rather than the object itself imitating them without the intermediary of a person (Agnetta & Rochat, ibid). From this point on, infants detect the intent of someone trying to imitate them. More importantly, they appear to be motivated to pay significantly more attention to that person. From this developmental juncture, others become the looking glass self or social mirror in which they start to identify and project themselves as embodied entities.

As another index of identification and projection into the mind of others emerging by 14 months, infants begin to reproduce faithfully the form of the gesture of an adult modeling a novel effect on an object, that is, a novel “affordance” for action on the object. As illustrated in Figure 4, the 18-month-old Samoan child watching an adult turning on a push on light (novel to the child) by leaning forward and hitting it with the forehead will tend to reproduce that exact non-ergonomic gesture when it is their turn to play with the object. Contrary to 9-month-olds, the child does not just emulate the effect on the object modeled by the adult but they also reproduce the way the adult acted upon the object to cause the effect. This constitutes a first clear sign of social conformity. From approximately 14 months, children become sensitive to the form and mannerisms of actions in their imitation of others. Furthermore, they step into the shoes of others, projecting and presumably starting to identify themselves with others as intentional agents. The emergence of a propensity toward social conformity while learning from others captures a new kind or level of self-awareness. It is an awareness of self that becomes normative in relation to others. It rests on a new underlying mechanism of self-awareness, what can be considered as the necessary but not sufficient mechanism underlying the fateful human self-reflexive loop that would, following Darwin, set us apart in nature. Such loop becomes unmistakenly manifest from 18 months when children begin to recognize themselves and show embarrassment seeing themselves in a mirror (Lewis & Ramsay, 2004; Amsterdam, 1972; but see also Broesch, Callaghan, Henrich, Murphy, & Rochat, 2011, for cultural variations; see Figure 2 for illustration).

Figure 4. .

An 18-month-old Samoan child watching (A) an adult modeling the action of turning a light on that is novel to the child by leaning forward and hitting it with the forehead. (B) The child imitates by reproducing the exact non-ergonomic gesture modeled by the adult, sign of emerging social conformity, concomitant to self-consciousness proper (photos by P. Rochat).

EIGHTEEN MONTHS REVOLUTION: FATEFUL LOOP OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS

As previously mentioned, when children from around 18 months pass the mirror mark test, this passing does not just index self-recognition in the sense of recognizing oneself in the specular image of mirrors (i.e., me as I see others). What they recognize is their public image, what they project to the outside world and may be sanctioned by, with the dreaded possibility of disapproval and social rejection. When passing the mark test by touching the mark directly on their forehead, they do tend to remove it immediately. More importantly, and corroborating Darwin's observation on human blushing (see quote in the Introduction section), this discovery is often accompanied by embarrassment. The child typically responds by immediately removing the mark, often stunned and hiding their face in shame following a swift mark removal (see picture above). They may also engage in self-conscious clowning of themselves. Interestingly, as we have seen, when surrounding people wear an identical mark on their forehead, the child passing the test will touch the mark, but also leaving it or place it back on their forehead if they removed it previously (Rochat et al., 2012). What infants indicate is that not only do they recognize in the mirror is the objectified reflection of their embodied self, but also what others see of themselves. This is the emergence of a novel form of consciousness as co-consciousness with others in mind. It is also the first clear expression of what we see as the fateful human self-reflexive loop, the source of human shame, guilt, and the quest for approval and positive evaluation from others to avoid the fundamental dread of social rejection or BAN, acronym that also stands for basic affiliation need (Rochat, 2009). It is a revolutionary transition because, as for the preceding, it is at the origins of a qualitatively new psychology. It marks the emergence of human unique self-consciousness psychology with, at its core, a radically novel concern for reputation and self-image management. It is the start of the human life span construction of a conceptual sense of self projected onto the world and imagined for ourselves. The concept of self emerges and is shaped mainly by how others perceive us, be they real or imagined.

By the end of the second year, the constitutive element of human self-conscious psychology is in place. From approximately 18 months, the child embarks into the life span construction of an elusive sense of their own identity and unduplicated, qua authentic self through both their own evaluative eyes, but especially through the imagined eyes of others. They start caring about reputation—what may be considered the foundational cornerstone of human psychology.

FINAL REMARK: URGENCY OF CONSCIOUSNESS RESEARCH

To reiterate the opening paragraph of this article, today's pressing call for consciousness research goes way beyond perennial basic questions and concerns regarding the nature and content of consciousness. With the rapid advance of AI, such concerns have broken away from the ivory tower of academia. Indeed, how should we assimilate and make sense of such progress that put into question what may be authentic about who we are as persons, questioning the unduplicable authenticity of who we are as self-reflecting, embodied, and feeling entities?

The thought that we may be interchangeable with clever AI machines is indeed profoundly unsettling. AI enthusiasts may argue that intelligent machines are nothing but mere technical means or tool prostheses expanding self experience. Accordingly, AI engines are nothing but mere self-extension, enhancing rather than replacing what remains a core, embodied, and autonomous self. Nonetheless, such self-extension raises the issue of how stretchable or extensible the constitutive core of human self-consciousness may be before it breaks. Are we on our way of losing the sense of ownership from which we generate value for self by gaining affiliation and recognition from others?

Here, I tried to show that developmental research points to the fact that what we may experience as the uncanny, unsettling feeling of losing authenticity, particularly in the current high spin of AI revolution, finds its roots in a unique, self-reflective, and evaluative psychological trait that is constitutive of who we are as a species. This trait, as already pointed by Darwin years ago, is the peculiar self-consciousness and human sense of reputation that children develop in the first 2 years of their life.

Corresponding author: Philippe Rochat, Department of Psychology, Emory University, PAIS building, Eagle row 36, Atlanta, GA 30322, or via e-mail: psypr@emory.edu.

Diversity in Citation Practices

Retrospective analysis of the citations in every article published in this journal from 2010 to 2021 reveals a persistent pattern of gender imbalance: Although the proportions of authorship teams (categorized by estimated gender identification of first author/last author) publishing in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (JoCN) during this period were M(an)/M = .407, W(oman)/M = .32, M/W = .115, and W/W = .159, the comparable proportions for the articles that these authorship teams cited were M/M = .549, W/M = .257, M/W = .109, and W/W = .085 (Postle and Fulvio, JoCN, 34:1, pp. 1–3). Consequently, JoCN encourages all authors to consider gender balance explicitly when selecting which articles to cite and gives them the opportunity to report their article's gender citation balance.