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Self-Awareness and the Emergence of Mind in Primates

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To date humans, chimpanzees, and orangutans are the only species which have been shown capable of recognizing themselves in mirrors. Several species of macaques have now been provided with years of continuous exposure to mirrors, but they still persist in reacting to their reflection as if they were seeing other monkeys. Even gibbons (apes) and gorillas (great apes) seem incapable of learning that their behavior is the source of the behavior depicted in the image. Most primates, therefore, appear to lack a cognitive category for processing mirrored information about themselves. The implications of these data for traditional views of consciousness are considered briefly, and a recent attempt to develop an operant analog to self-recognition is critically evaluated. Finally, an attempt is made to show that self-awareness, consciousness, and mind are not mutually exclusive cognitive categories and that the emergence of self-awareness may be equivalent to the emergence of mind. Several indices of “mind” which can be applied to nonhuman species are discussed in the context of an attempt to develop a comparative psychology of mind.
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Behavioural Processes 42 (1998) 239247
Self-awareness and the evolution of social intelligence
Gordon G. Gallup Jr.
Department of Psychology,State Uni6ersity of New York,Albany,New York
12222
,USA
Received 26 June 1996; received in revised form 5 November 1996; accepted 15 November 1996
Abstract
The use of one’s own experience as a model to make inferences about the experiences of others is theorized to be
the means by which a variety of introspectively based social strategies developed for both competing and cooperating
with one another (e.g. gratitude, grudging, sympathy, empathy, deception, pretending and sorrow). The proposition
that this ability is a byproduct of self-awareness is developed in some detail and the predictions which follow from
this model of social intelligence are considered in light of the evidence. © 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.
Keywords
:
Self-awareness; Mental-state attribution; Social cognition; Consciousness; Mind; Self-recognition; Mind-
lessness
1. Species differences in self-recognition
It is now well established, using a variety of
strategies and techniques, that after relatively
brief periods of exposure to mirrors, many chim-
panzees and orangutans can learn to recognize
their own reflections (Gallup, 1970; Suarez and
Gallup, 1981; Povinelli et al., 1993). There has
been a recent claim that this evidence is inconclu-
sive because of the possibility of an anesthetiza-
tion confound (Heyes, 1994). However, these
arguments are based on an incomplete and inade-
quate review of the literature and no new data are
presented to support this assertion. We have re-
cently presented a reanalysis of existing data
along with additional findings which clearly show
that anesthetization is neither a necessary condi-
tion for obtaining evidence of self-recognition,
nor does it provide a plausible account of the data
obtained from chimpanzees that are anesthetized
as a means of unobtrusively applying marks to
the face (Gallup et al., 1995; Eddy et al., 1996;
Povinelli et al., 1997). Rather than raising serious
doubts about the existence of self-recognition,
Heyes’ arguments amount to an unsuccessful at-
tempt to salavage radical behaviorism in the face
of growing evidence that it is a failed paradigm.
Gallup (1994) provides a detailed account of the
methods and procedures that have been used for
purposes of assessing mirror self-recognition.
Whereas many chimpanzees and orangutans
seem capable of realizing that their behavior is the
0376-6357/98/$19.00 © 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
PII
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source of the behavior depicted in a mirror, at-
tempts to demonstrate self-recognition in other
primates have met with no success, despite peri-
ods of extended exposure to mirrors and the use
of a variety of techniques designed to make the
identify of the reflection more explicit and/or
overcome certain inherent limitations of mirror
self-confrontation (e.g. gaze aversion). The avail-
able evidence shows that even when exposed to
mirrors for several years or more, most primates
(as well as a variety of other animals) persist in
responding to their own reflection as though it
represented the presence of another individual
(Gallup and Suarez, 1991). In those instances in
which the duration of exposure has been sufficient
to produce habituation of social gestures directed
toward the reflection, there is still evidence to
show that a monkey’s image in the mirror contin-
ues to function as a social stimulus (Anderson,
1994 for further discussion and elaboration of this
point).
Even most gorillas, which are classified along
with chimpanzees and orangutans as great apes,
seem incapable of correctly deciphering mirrored
information about themselves (Suarez and
Gallup, 1981; Ledbetter and Basen, 1982). There
are a few claims of individual exceptions to this
pattern of consistent failures to find evidence of
self-recognition among gorillas (Patterson, 1984).
However, videotaped evidence of ostensible in-
stances of self-recognition by gorillas are either
ambiguous and unconvincing, or have not been
made publicly available.
The gorilla’s inability to recognize itself in a
mirror has not gone unnoticed. As an illustration
of the extremes to which some people have gone
to rationalize the performance of gorillas, Rollin
(1989) contends that at some point during their
evolution perhaps gorillas found themselves living
under conditions where they were forced to drink
from crocodile infested waters. Under such cir-
cumstances Rollin reasons that the gorilla that
paused to contemplate its own reflection in the
surface of the water would have been especially
vulnerable to crocodile predation and therefore,
selection operated to produce gorillas who are
indifferent to or actually avoided their reflections.
Suffice it to say that none of the available evi-
dence supports this argument. When initially con-
fronted with their reflections in mirrors, gorillas
show an avid interest in the image and just like
chimpanzees and orangutans, spend substantial
amounts of time orienting toward and looking at
the mirror (Suarez and Gallup, 1981). For a fur-
ther discussion and analysis of the gorilla’s failure
to evidence self-recognition see Gallup (1991,
1997).
2. Self-conception
What are we to make of these species’ differ-
ences in mirror self-recognition? Many animals
appear to lack a cognitive category for processing
mirrored information about themselves. Indeed, it
can be argued that it may be heuristically valuable
to suppose that organisms capable of recognizing
themselves in mirrors are creatures that can con-
ceive of themselves (Gallup, 1991).
There are at least three discernable components
to self-conception; a sense of continuity, a sense
of personal agency and a sense of identity (see
also Povinelli, 1995; Povinelli and Cant, 1995).
Individuals who are self-aware, as evidenced by
being able to become the object of their own
attention, experience a sense of psychological con-
tinuity over time and space. For example, your
interests, attitudes and values remain much the
same from one day to the next and from one
situation to another. This temporal/spatial stabil-
ity in the mental attributes that characterize you
(and often distinguish you from others) is what
gives rise to your underlying sense of continuity.
Organisms that can conceive of themselves also
develop an important sense of personal agency as
a result of interacting and informally experiment-
ing with both animate and inanimate features of
the world around them. They learn, in effect, that
what they do, when they do it and how they do it
can sometimes produce or at least influence a
variety of different outcomes. In other words,
they come to realize that they can exercise a
degree of control over certain things and it is out
of these kinds of response contingent experiences
that a sense of personal agency emerges. Povinelli
and Cant (1995) speculate that being in constant
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danger of falling out of the trees due to an
unusually large body mass, is what prompted the
development of a sense of personal agency on the
part of the now extinct arboreal/protohominid
precursor to great apes and humans.
Consider Mead’s position concerning the third
component to self conception, namely that the
sense of identity develops as a result of social
experience with others (Mead, 1934). In the pro-
cess of interacting with different people you en-
counter a variety of perspectives, interests,
attitudes and objectives which may not always be
the same as your own. The realization that you
are both similar to and at the same time different
from others is what gradually gives rise to and
serves to define and refine the major parameters
of your sense of identity.
Given these various components to the sense of
self, how does self-conception affect behavior? Do
self-aware creatures behave in ways that are fun-
damentally different from those that are not?
What kinds of behaviors ought to distinguish
self-aware organisms from those that lack the
capacity to become the object of their own atten-
tion? It seems to me that organisms that can
conceive of themselves are in a position to do
several things. First, because of their sense of
enduring continuity over time and space they
should be able to represent themselves in relation
to past, present and future events (Gallup, 1982).
That is, by being able to think about themselves
at different points in time they can engage in
different forms of mental time travel (see Sudden-
dorf, 1994 for an extended elaboration of this
point).
Second, as a result of a sense of personal iden-
tity and continuity, organisms that are aware of
their own existence could find themselves in the
position to take a logical (but maybe not obvious)
next step. To be aware of your own existence
raises the possibility of confronting the inevitabil-
ity of your eventual demise (Gallup, 1979). Dur-
ing human history the inductive basis for taking
this step probably involved witnessing successive
instances of the transition between existence and
nonexistence in companions. On the basis of see-
ing others die one might eventually extrapolate to
the question of their own death. In other words,
death awareness is a unique price that we pay for
self-awareness. Although there is doubt that chim-
panzees realize that they will die, it might be
possible to educate a chimpanzee about the in-
evitability of its own individual demise (Premack,
1976).
Finally, an organism that can become the ob-
ject of its own attention, in the sense of being
aware of being aware, finds itself in the novel
position of being able to make inferences about
comparable states of awareness in others. Indeed,
given the organism’s ability to reflect on its own
experience it could begin to use that information
as a means of modeling different experiences,
desires and knowledge states in others. It is this
latter capacity that will be focused upon for the
remainder of this paper since it is this ability that
makes social cognition possible.
3. Mental-state attribution
It has been argued that rather than being mutu-
ally exclusive cognitive domains, self-awareness,
consciousness and mind are all part and parcel of
the same underlying process (Gallup, 1983). Thus,
according to the model that has been developed,
organisms that can recognize themselves in mir-
rors ought to differ in some fundamental way
from those that fail to realize that their behavior
is the source of the behavior depicted in the
image. However, before reviewing the evidence
that bears on this point it would be appropriate to
expand on and elaborate some of the assumptions
and implications of this approach. The term
‘mind’ refers to the ability to use your experience
and your mental states to make inferences about
what others know, how they feel, or what they
want. In this sense ‘mind’ is roughly synonymous
with the terms ‘mental-state attribution’, ‘social
cognition’ and ‘Machiavellian intelligence’
(Whiten and Byrne, 1988).
While it is probably true that no two people
ever experience the same event in exactly the same
way, since we are members of the same species we
share similar sensory equipment and underlying
neurological hardware. As a consequence there is
bound to be considerable overlap between your
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42 (1998) 239247
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experience of a particular object and/or event and
mine and therefore, targeting aspects of my expe-
rience as a means of developing an inferential
model of yours can begin. Moreover, given a
knowledge of ones’ own mental, emotional and
motivational states and their relationship to vari-
ous external events, one can model comparable
states in others. Self-awareness, in other words,
paves the way for an inferential knowledge of
others.
It might be helpful to use an analogy to illus-
trate this capacity. There have been many at-
tempts to simulate intelligence using computers
and in principle it should be fairly easy to simu-
late mind using a computer. To begin with, a
computer analog of mind could be represented by
a subroutine in a computer which is designed to
monitor the operation and disposition of a limited
set of specifically targeted features of the com-
puter system at large. On that basis, the computer
would then begin to make inferences about the
presence and operational status of similar systems
in other computers. Then to complete the anal-
ogy, the computer would have to take one more
step and begin using the information it has about
the ostensible operational status of other comput-
ers to modify the means by which it handles
different dimensions of input so as to gain a
competitive advantage. What kind of advantage?
I am not sure that computers compete with one
another in the first place, but to the extent that
they do, I suppose it would probably amount to
some kind of computational advantage. Unlike
computers, biological systems clearly compete
among one another for a variety of scarce re-
sources (e.g. food, nesting places and mating op-
portunities) and unlike computers the outcome of
this competition bears in important ways on
whether these systems gain genetic representation
in subsequent generations. Being able to model
mental states in others confers some obvious intel-
lectual/strategic advantages when it comes to co-
operating and competing with others (Humphrey,
1976).
Not only do people routinely make inferences
and attributions about various mental states
among one another (e.g. ‘you did that on pur-
pose’ or ‘you really want me to leave, don’t
you?’), but we all show an almost irresistible
tendency to generalize these attributions to pets
and other species. Anthropomorphism, which in-
volves attributing human mental states to ani-
mals, is widespread and almost automatic.
Making these everyday, informal inferences about
mental states in animals may be a natural
byproduct of our tendency to make mental-state
attributions among each other (Gallup et al.,
1997) and in that sense the widespread existence
of anthropomorphism is prima facie evidence of
mind in our own species (Gallup, 1985). In order
to infer that the baby monkey is ‘sad and lonely’
it presupposes that you have had prior experience
with what it feels like to be sad and lonely and
you now map your experience of those mental
states on to what you assume to be comparable
states in the monkey.
4. Mindlessness
In terms of tangible/empirical implications, this
model predicts that species that can recognize
themselves in mirrors ought to differ in some
fairly definitive but at the same time subtle ways
from those that cannot. If it is the case that
organisms which fail to recognize themselves in
mirrors do so because of an inability to conceive
of themselves in the first place, then they should
fail to show evidence of a variety of introspec-
tively based social strategies such as grudging,
gratitude, sympathy, empathy, attribution, inten-
tional deception, sorrow, pretending, boredom
and role playing. The distinction that is being
made here is between the presence or absence of
mind and surprising as it may seem, the presence
or absence of mind is not obvious. It is not
obvious for several reasons. As we have already
seen by virtue of anthropomorphism, in the ab-
sence of any hard evidence people nevertheless
tend to treat animals as if they had minds. Just as
someone once said that fish would be the last ones
to discover water, because we have minds we tend
to take minds for granted. We are so immersed in
mind that it is difficult to conceive of its absence.
As a consequence one way to make this capacity
stand out in relief is to provide some examples of
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mind by negation; i.e. what it would be like not to
have a mind. I will use three examples; what it
would be like to lose your mind, what it would be
like to experience a momentary lapse of mind and
finally what it would be like not to have a mind in
the first place.
Blindsight is an example of what it would be
like to lose your mind. Blindsight is a condition
where extensive damage to the occipital cortex
produces an inability to see, even though the
primary visual system (e.g. eyes, optic nerve, vi-
sual tegmentum) remains intact. For a long time it
was assumed that such patients had indeed been
rendered blind until Wieskrantz and some of his
colleagues in England decided to probe the appar-
ent inability to see in patients with occipital lobe
damage (see Weiskrantz, 1995 for a review of
some of the current evidence). What they discov-
ered was that when such patients were encouraged
to use guessing strategies, not only could they
‘guess’ the correct location of different objects in
visual space, but they could even discriminate
among different objects using a guessing strategy!
Vision, in other words, is still present in such
patients but it has been reduced to an unconscious
sensation. In terms of this model, it would be fair
to say that blindsight patients have been rendered
mindless in the visual modality. Although they
can continue to process and respond to visual
cues, they are no longer aware of being aware of
visual information. Stated another way, they can
continue to use visual cues but they can no longer
represent the information upon which those cues
are based.
One of the reasons blindsight patients appear
so impaired is because of all the negative transfer
that is produced as a consequence of their prior
conscious experience with vision. Indeed, if some-
one was born with extensive damage to the visual
cortex they should grow up acting visually nor-
mal. That is, they would probably grow up using
visual guessing strategies and never think any-
thing about it. It would only become apparent
that they were visually impaired if they were
placed in a competitive social situation that re-
quired them to use their visual experience to infer
something about another person’s visual perspec-
tive. For instance, if I were to give you experience
with blindfolds and then confront you with an-
other person wearing a blindfold, you would
probably use your prior experience with visual
obstructions to infer and model their obstructed
visual state. Someone born with blindsight ought
to be incapable of making these kinds of infer-
ences about visual experiences in others.
What would it be like to experience a momen-
tary lapse of mind? An example that many people
can identify with is what could be called a ‘mind-
less conversation’. The prototypical instance of
this involves a situation in which someone ap-
proaches you and abruptly begins a conversation
as if you had been privileged either to their prior
experiences or their thoughts. So that rather than
giving you the necessary background information
to set the stage for a conversation, they might
come up to you and say, ‘what do you think we
ought to do about that?’ Your response, of
course, would be, ‘do about what?’ Or they might
approach you out of the clear blue and say ‘gee,
that really makes me mad!’ Once again your
response would be ‘what makes you mad?’ In
each of these instances there is a momentary
breakdown of the speaker’s ability to take into
account the mental state of the other person. In
order to convey a message it requires that the
listener be given adequate background informa-
tion so as to create an appropriate mentalistic
context for the message to be meaningful.
Finally there is the issue of what it would be
like not have a mind in the first place. Imagine for
the moment that you have a dog and your dog
returns home one day in distress with quills em-
bedded in its nose as a consequence of an encoun-
ter with a porcupine. With a concern for your
pet’s well-being it is essential that you take steps
to have those quills removed. You could either
take your dog to a veterinarian and have him/her
do it, or you could get a pair of pliers and attempt
to extract the quills yourself. If you were to opt
for the latter alternative it would probably prove
to be an excruciating ordeal. It is not that you
would experience any physical pain as a conse-
quence, but as you used the pliers to extract the
barbed quills from your dog’s nose and witnessed
its reaction you would probably find it virtually
impossible not to empathize with what you as-
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sume to be going on inside the dog’s head. It is
not a question of whether you had ever been
quilled by a porcupine. You would simply use
your prior experience with other sources of pain
and discomfort to generalize and make inferences
about the dog’s ostensibly painful experience as
the quills are removed. For humans, it would not
matter whether the victim of the encounter with a
porcupine was a dog, a cat, a horse, or a cow. It
would be difficult not to empathize with the vic-
tim regardless of who the victim might be. But
how do you think another unrelated dog witness-
ing this transaction between you and your dog
would respond? As any veterinarian can testify,
most dogs are virtually oblivious to signs of pain
and distress in other dogs. Although dogs can
experience pain in much the same way that hu-
mans do, dogs differ from us in that they cannot
conceive of themselves and therefore, they cannot
use their experience with pain to model painful
experiences in other dogs or other species. Dogs
are mindless when it comes to the experiences and
mental lives of other dogs. That is not to say that
dogs are incapable of responding in very sophisti-
cated ways to other dogs, but their analysis of
other dogs (and people for that matter) is based
solely on cues that derive from the overt behavior
of the other individual and not what that individ-
ual may or may not know, may or may not want,
or may or may not intend to do.
5. Evidence of mind
When tested under appropriate conditions, spe-
cies that can recognize themselves in mirrors
should show evidence of being able to use their
experience to make inferences about mental states
in others. Thus, according to my model, chim-
panzees should pass (at least some) tests of men-
tal-state attribution, whereas rhesus monkeys
ought to consistently fail such tests. Although the
data that bear on these different outcomes are far
from complete, preliminary results are consistent
with the model. Table 1 summarizes the results
from a number of recent experimental studies on
mental-state attribution in chimpanzees and dif-
ferent species of macaques. On the basis of these
kinds of data it can be argued that chimpanzees
are the equivalent of emerging (albeit imperfect)
cognitive psychologists, whereas rhesus monkeys
represent the pure case of what amounts to a
radical behaviorist (Gallup, 1996). That is, just as
our previous discussion of dogs would suggest,
the evidence shows that rhesus monkeys which are
incapable of recognizing themselves in mirrors,
seem correspondingly incapable of taking into
account what other monkeys may or may not
know. Indeed, it would follow from the present
analysis that rhesus monkeys do not even know
what they know. As illustrated by blindsight pa-
tients, acting on what you know and knowing
what you know may be very different issues.
When it comes to their interactions with others,
rhesus monkeys appear to be guided solely by an
analysis of external contingencies embedded in the
overt behavior of other monkeys.
This model ought to also apply to humans. Just
as the presence or absence of self-recognition be-
tween different species ought to bear on their
ability to engage in mental-state attribution, the
same differences should apply to individuals who
can and cannot recognize themselves in mirrors.
Humans represent an almost ideal, naturally-oc-
Table 1
Evidence of mental-state attribution in primates
Source Chimpanzees
a
Macaques
a
Anderson et al. (1995)
Anderson et al. (1996)
Cheney and Seyfarth (1990)
deWaal (1982) +
Hess et al. (1993)
Kummer et al. (1996)
+Menzel (1973, 1975)
Povinelli and Eddy (1996)
+Povinelli et al. (1990)
+Povinelli et al. (1991)
Povinelli et al. (1992a,b)
Povinelli et al. (1992a,b)
+Premack (1988)
+Premack and Woodruff
(1978)
Woodruff and Premack +
(1979)
a
+’, evidence for mental-state attribution; and ‘’, absence
of evidence for mental-state attribution.
G.G.Gallup
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42 (1998) 239247
245
Table 2
Social intelligence in human children between 18 and 24
months of age
Social intelligence skills
Self-recognition
Use of personal pronouns
Prosocial behaviour
Self-conscious play
Mastery smiles
Perspective taking
Autobiographical memory
Pretend play/role playing
themselves in mirrors. Although I know of no
data that bear on this latter issue, it clearly repre-
sents another fairly direct, testable (and therefore,
falsifiable) implication of this model.
6. Concluding comments
One way to characterize what we know about
social cognition and mental-state attribution from
an evolutionary perspective would be to say that
many species may have clever brains but blank
minds (Humphrey, 1982). Clever brains in the
sense that they can learn, remember and solve a
variety of problems, but blank minds in the sense
that they lack the capacity to represent mental
states in themselves or others. If a species fails to
show evidence of self-conception, there is no rea-
son to assume that it is aware of what it is doing.
As evidence by the behavior of sleepwalkers and
blindsight patients, you do not need to know
what you are doing in order to do it in an
appropriate way.
According to the present account of social intel-
ligence, we may be the source of our own intelli-
gence. Although there are reasons to believe that
self-conception evolved for reasons that are unre-
lated to social intelligence (Povinelli and Cant,
1995; Gallup, 1997), self-awareness and mental-
state attribution in humans have been maintained
and elaborated because of the advantages of being
able to take into account the experiences and
intentions of each other. When it came to compet-
ing and cooperating among one another for re-
sources, the ability to model different features of
our respective mental worlds for purposes of de-
veloping a variety of introspectively based social
strategies (e.g. gratitude, grudging, deception,
sympathy, sorrow and pretending) represented a
significant advantage (Humphrey, 1976). Indeed,
from this perspective, the evolution of language
itself may have been driven largely by pressures to
fine tune this emerging capacity for social intelli-
gence. According to this model, language evolved
to accomplish two ends; (1) to enable us to more
effectively share experiences and mental-states
and (2) to create a means of manipulating experi-
ences and mental states in one another. It is
curring within-subjects design that can be used for
purposes of assessing predictions derived from
this model. Human infants all pass through an
early stage where they are (just like rhesus mon-
keys) incapable of recognizing themselves in mir-
rors. Prior to about 18 months of age human
infants respond to themselves in mirrors as
though they were seeing another infant. Most
studies of the development of self-recognition in
human children converge to show that this capac-
ity does not emerge until they reach 18 24
months of age (Anderson, 1984). Thus, based on
this model, evidence of mental-state attribution in
children ought to only appear at or after the point
in time when they begin to show evidence of being
able to correctly decipher mirrored information
about themselves. Consistent with the implica-
tions of this analysis, Table 2 depicts some of the
changes in the behavior of young children that
occur between 18 and 24 months of age which
implicate the emergence of self-conception at this
point in human development.
It is interesting to note that among humans,
self-conception is subject to constraints at two
points in the life-span developmental sequence.
Not only do children fail to recognize themselves
in mirrors prior to 1
1
2
2 years of age, but senility
can also be accompanied by the loss of self-recog-
nition (Biringer and Anderson, 1992). Thus, not
only would one expect the ability to reason about
mental states in others to begin at about 2 years
of age, but you would also expect it to be lost at
or about the same point in time that senile pa-
tients begin to fail to respond appropriately to
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42 (1998) 239247
246
curious to note that although evolution itself is an
unconscious process based on genetic accidents
which lacks an intentional, or deliberate compo-
nent, in the case of humans and perhaps several
species of great apes evolution has given rise to
creatures which are capable of conscious, deliber-
ate, intentional acts.
It is also curious to note that this model has
brought the author full circle, in that it provides
an account of the author’s behavior. In devising
the original experiment on self-recognition in
chimpanzees (Gallup, 1970) it is apparent, in ret-
rospect, that the author used his ostensible experi-
ence with imaginary facial marks to anticipate
how chimpanzees might respond upon recovery
from anesthesia when they discovered comparable
marks on their faces that could only be seen in a
mirror.
To sum up the relationship between self-aware-
ness and social intelligence, several other implica-
tions of this model will be briefly focused upon.
Whereas Mead (1934) argued that knowledge of
self presupposes knowledge of others (see Gallup
et al., 1971 for some evidence with chimpanzees
that is consistent with this position), this model
takes this logic a step further by stipulating that
knowledge of mental states in others presupposes
knowledge of mental states in one’s self. More-
over, if this is correct, then in order to keep the
famous quote from Rene Descartes, ‘I think,
therefore I am’, consistent with the emerging evi-
dence it would have to be rephrased to read ‘I am,
therefore I think’. In other words, it is our ability
to conceive of ourselves in the first place that
makes thinking and consciousness possible, not
vice versa.
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... There is a lot of debate about what cognitive processes are implied by success on tests of self-recognition [1][2][3][4]. The ability to recognize oneself in a mirror may be linked to self-awareness [5,6] or might not require any complex sense of self [1,3]. Regardless, the capacity of an organism to recognize itself could be adaptive in a number of ways. ...
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Forty years ago, Gallup proposed that theory of mind presupposes self‐awareness. Following Humphrey, his hypothesis was that individuals can infer the mental states of others thanks to the ability to monitor their own mental states in similar circumstances. Since then, advances in several disciplines, such as comparative and developmental psychology, have provided empirical evidence to test Gallup's hypothesis. Herein, we review and discuss this evidence.
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The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness is the first of its kind in the field, and its appearance marks a unique time in the history of intellectual inquiry on the topic. After decades during which consciousness was considered beyond the scope of legitimate scientific investigation, consciousness re-emerged as a popular focus of research towards the end of the last century, and it has remained so for nearly 20 years. There are now so many different lines of investigation on consciousness that the time has come when the field may finally benefit from a book that pulls them together and, by juxtaposing them, provides a comprehensive survey of this exciting field. An authoritative desk reference, which will also be suitable as an advanced textbook.
Chapter
The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness is the first of its kind in the field, and its appearance marks a unique time in the history of intellectual inquiry on the topic. After decades during which consciousness was considered beyond the scope of legitimate scientific investigation, consciousness re-emerged as a popular focus of research towards the end of the last century, and it has remained so for nearly 20 years. There are now so many different lines of investigation on consciousness that the time has come when the field may finally benefit from a book that pulls them together and, by juxtaposing them, provides a comprehensive survey of this exciting field. An authoritative desk reference, which will also be suitable as an advanced textbook.
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The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness is the first of its kind in the field, and its appearance marks a unique time in the history of intellectual inquiry on the topic. After decades during which consciousness was considered beyond the scope of legitimate scientific investigation, consciousness re-emerged as a popular focus of research towards the end of the last century, and it has remained so for nearly 20 years. There are now so many different lines of investigation on consciousness that the time has come when the field may finally benefit from a book that pulls them together and, by juxtaposing them, provides a comprehensive survey of this exciting field. An authoritative desk reference, which will also be suitable as an advanced textbook.
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The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness is the first of its kind in the field, and its appearance marks a unique time in the history of intellectual inquiry on the topic. After decades during which consciousness was considered beyond the scope of legitimate scientific investigation, consciousness re-emerged as a popular focus of research towards the end of the last century, and it has remained so for nearly 20 years. There are now so many different lines of investigation on consciousness that the time has come when the field may finally benefit from a book that pulls them together and, by juxtaposing them, provides a comprehensive survey of this exciting field. An authoritative desk reference, which will also be suitable as an advanced textbook.
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In humans, self-recognition of own reflection is commonplace but not universal. The capacity to recognize self in a mirror appears to be subject to maturational and experiential constraints. In the first place, the ability to correctly interpret mirrored information about the self presupposes prior experience with mirrors. For instance, people born with congenital visual defects who undergo operations in later life—which provide for normal sight—respond just like nonhumans and initially react to themselves in mirrors as though they were seeing other people. Social behavior in response to mirrors begins at about six months of age, but the average child does not start to show reliable signs of self-recognition until 18 to 24 months. A prevailing view of self-concept formation in humans is that the sense of self emerges out of a social milieu. Self-awareness according to this view is a by-product of social interaction with others. For instance, according to G.H. Mead, in order for the self to emerge as an object of conscious inspection, it requires the opportunity to see yourself as you are seen by others.
Chapter
The first published report of mirror self-recognition in a nonhuman appeared in the literature several decades ago (Gallup, 1970). Subsequent to the original demonstration in chimpanzees, a large number of different species have been tested for their ability to correctly decipher mirrored information about themselves, but to date, positive results have only been obtained with humans, chimpanzees, and orangutans. Recent reviews of this literature can be found in Anderson (1984), Gallup (1987), and Povinelli (1987).