Children's Understanding of the Relation Between Delayed Video Representation and Current Reality: A Test for self-awareness?

Abstract

While children from about 18 months on can use a mirror to show self-recognition through the retrieval of a covertly placed mark from their forehead, Povinelli, Landau, and Perilloux (1996) showed that four- but not two-year-olds pass a similar surprise-mark test involving three-minute-old videos of themselves. The authors argued that this marks the emergence of what they called the "proper self". The current study (n=40) supported the claim for a developmental asynchrony by showing that three- and four-year-olds who fail the delayed video version of the surprise-mark task pass the mirror version. However, the same performance pattern was observed in an analogous task involving the introduction of an object in the room that was visible only on the video screen (surprise-object task). Surprise-mark and surprise-object tasks were positively correlated. Thus, young children’s problems seem to reflect general difficulties in reasoning from the unexpected information in the video to the current situation, rather than particular deficits in self-awareness.