The lessons in a mirror

We talked about the development of self-recognition abilities in class Tuesday.  As I mentioned, apes, dolphins and maybe even pigs have self-recognition abilities.  Self-recognition is generally tested with the rouge test, in which a spot of rouge is placed on a child's nose. When looking in a mirror, children who have attained self-recognition will reach towards their nose, indicating they understand the image in the mirror is their own.  This generally happens at about a year and a half of age, and is considered to be a significant achievement.

So why is this considered important?  Well, self-recognition is viewed as a marker of the development of the self, and the development of the self is a fundamental skill that underlies many abilities.  Among the most important of these are abilities related to social competence.  But why should understanding that you are a person separate from other people have an impact on social competence?

Well, humans are complicated creatures, and much of our understanding of social interactions involves figuring out what is going on in people's mind's on the basis of clues they give us or things that we might observe them do or say.  And to do this effectively, we need to be able to model what's going on in their minds.  For example, before we can understand how to cooperate with another person, we need to be able to figure out what it is that they want us to do.  Before we compete with someone, it helps us to know what they know, or how far they will go to win, or to pick up on cues of their weaknesses.  If the understanding of the distinction between your mind and the mind of others is missing, this makes social interactions a cacophony of confusion.

As with many of our most sophisticated skills, it turns out that we do this so naturally and easily we don't even realize we are continually doing it.  In fact, it comes so easily that much of the work on the modeling of others' minds (known as "theory of mind") emerged from research on people with autism.  In autism, this understanding of the split between yours and others' minds appears to be lacking, making social interactions confusing and nonsensical.  Note that in this clip , the boy doesn't seem to be able to understand that a person might not know the location of a hidden coin.  "I know where it is," he thinks, "so clearly, they must as well."

Self-recognition isn't the same thing as theory of mind certainly.  But it's a clue that things are going in the right direction, and an easy way to assess the development of the self.