Université Libre de Bruxelles, Avenue FD Roosevelt, 50 (CP191), 1050 Brussels, Belgium.
Conscious Cogn. 2011 Sep;20(3):578-85. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2010.10.010. Epub 2010 Nov 18.
This paper focuses on the development of explicit self-awareness in children. Mirror self-recognition has been the most popular paradigm used to assess this ability in children. Nevertheless, according to Rochat (2003), there are, at least, three different levels of explicit self-awareness. We therefore designed three different self-recognition tasks, each corresponding to one of these levels (a mirror self-recognition task, a picture self-recognition task and a masked self-recognition task). We observed a decrease in performance across the three tasks. This supports a developmental scale in self-awareness. Besides, the masked self-recognition performance makes it possible to assess the final and the most sophisticated level of self-awareness, i.e. the external self. To our best knowledge, this task is the first attempt to evaluate the external self in preverbal children. Our results indicate that 22-month old children show awareness of their external self or, at least, that this ability is in the process of being acquired.
这篇论文关注的是儿童自我意识的发展。镜像自我认知一直是评估儿童这一能力最常用的方法。然而，根据 Rochat（2003）的说法，自我意识至少有三个不同的层次。因此，我们设计了三个不同的自我认知任务，每个任务对应于其中一个层次（镜像自我认知任务、图片自我认知任务和蒙面自我认知任务）。我们观察到三个任务的表现都有所下降。这支持了自我意识的发展阶段。此外，蒙面自我认知任务可以评估自我意识的最终和最复杂的层次，即外部自我。据我们所知，这项任务是首次尝试评估前语言儿童的外部自我。我们的结果表明，22 个月大的儿童已经意识到自己的外部自我，或者至少已经开始获得这种能力。
