The aim of this study was to investigate if children’s early responsiveness toward social partners is developmentally related to their growing concept of self, as reflected in their mirror self-recognition (MSR) and delayed self-recognition (DSR). Thus, a longitudinal study assessed infants’ responsiveness (e.g., smiling, gaze) toward social partners during the still-face (SF) task and a social imitation game and related it to their emerging MSR and DSR. Thereby, children were tested at regular time points from 9 months to 4 years (...) of age. Results revealed significant predictive relations between children’s responsiveness toward a social partner in the SF task at 9 months and their MSR at 24 months. Further, interindividual differences in children’s awareness of and responsiveness toward being imitated in a social imitation game at 12 months proved to be the strongest predictor of children’s DSR at 4 years, while some additional variance was explained by MSR at 24 months and verbal intelligence. Overall, findings suggest a developmental link between children’s early awareness of and responsiveness toward the social world and their later ability to form a concept of self. (shrink)

I sketch briefly some of the more influential theories concerned with the moral status of nonhuman animals, highlighting their biological/physiological aspects. I then survey the most prominent empirical research on the physiological and cognitive capacities of nonhuman animals, focusing primarily on sentience, but looking also at a few other morally relevant capacities such as self-awareness, memory, and mindreading. Lastly, I discuss two examples of current animal welfare policy, namely, animals used in industrialized food production and in scientific research. I argue (...) that even the most progressive current welfare policies lag behind, are ignorant of, or arbitrarily disregard the science on sentience and cognition. (shrink)

Strong arguments have been formulated that the computational limits of disembodied artificial intelligence (AI) will, sooner or later, be a problem that needs to be addressed. Similarly, convincing cases for how embodied forms of AI can exceed these limits makes for worthwhile research avenues. This paper discusses how embodied cognition brings with it other forms of information integration and decision-making consequences that typically involve discussions of machine cognition and similarly, machine consciousness. N. Katherine Hayles’s novel conception of nonconscious cognition in (...) her analysis of the human cognition-consciousness connection is discussed in relation to how nonconscious cognition can be envisioned and exacerbated in embodied AI. Similarly, this paper offers a way of understanding the concept of suffering in a way that is different than the conventional sense of attributing it to either a purely physical state or a conscious state, instead of grounding at least a type of suffering in this form of cognition. (shrink)

In keeping with recent views of consciousness of self as represented in the body in action, empirical studies are reviewed that demonstrate a bottlenose dolphin’s conscious awareness of its own body and body parts, implying a representational “body image” system. Additional work reviewed demonstrates an advanced capability of dolphins for motor imitation of self-produced behaviors and of behaviors of others, including imitation of human actions, supporting hypotheses that dolphins have a sense of agency and ownership of their actions and may (...) implicitly attribute those levels of self-awareness to others. Possibly, a mirror-neuron system, or its functional equivalent to that described in monkeys and humans, may mediate both self-awareness and awareness of others. (shrink)

For a robot to be capable of development it must be able to explore its environment and learn from its experiences. It must find opportunities to experience the unfamiliar in ways that reveal properties valid beyond the immediate context. In this paper, we develop a novel method for using the rhythm of everyday actions as a basis for identifying the characteristic appearance and sounds associated with objects, people, and the robot itself. Our approach is to identify and segment groups of (...) signals in individual modalities based on their rhythmic variation, then to identify and bind causally-related groups of signals across different modalities. By including proprioception as a modality, this cross-modal binding method applies to the robot itself, and we report a series of experiments in which the robot learns about the characteristics of its own body. (shrink)

The conclusions drawn from mirror self-recognition studies, in which nonhuman animals are tested for whether they detect a mark on their bodies which can be observed only in the mirror, are based on several presuppositions. These include that performance on the test is an indication of species wide rather than individual abilities, and that all the animals which pass the test are demonstrating the presence of the same psychological ability. However, further details about the results of the test indicate that (...) these presuppositions are false. Animals take the test as individuals, not as stand-ins for species, and members of different species rely on different cognitive mechanisms to pass the test. For nonhuman animals, passing the test seems to be a consequence of enculturation and practice. (shrink)

Existential anxiety is an outstanding issue both in psychology and philosophy. It implies the mental rummage following the notion of existence, inexistence and related concepts. Martin Heidegger is a philosopher incorporating the meaning of existential anxiety and time perception in a unique comprehensive view, suggesting that there is a relation between being, time and anxiety. To the best of our knowledge, no empirical study has assessed any association between time perception and existential anxiety. The current study aims at investigating the (...) mentioned association. Eighty four students in Tabriz University of Medical Sciences voluntarily participated in this study and gave their written informed consent. Time perception was assessed by verbal and production tests. The score of existential anxiety was obtained by the Good & Good Existential Anxiety Questionnaire. Association of time perception and existential anxiety was analyzed statistically. Mean score of existential anxiety of subjects was 7.57±4.75 out of 32. Accuracy of time perception was significantly related to existential anxiety score (_P_ = 0.034); in the manner that inaccurate time perceivers had higher existential anxiety scores. The results of this study are preliminary in line with the existential concepts presented by Heidegger; indicating that existential anxiety and time perception may have common roots. This understanding about existential anxiety suggests further explorations and deeper existential reasonings, as well as more efficient psychological and psychiatric clinical practice. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that many nonhuman animal beings are conscious and have some sense of self. Rather than ask whether they are conscious, I adopt an evolutionary perspective and ask why consciousness and a sense of self evolved—what are they good for? Comparative studies of animal cognition, ethological investigations that explore what it is like to be a certain animal, are useful for answering this question. Charles Darwin argued that the differences in cognitive abilities and emotions among animals (...) are differences in degree rather than differences in kind, and his view cautions against the unyielding claim that humans, and perhaps other great apes and cetaceans, are the only species in which a sense of self-awareness has evolved. I conclude that there are degrees of consciousness and self among animals and that it is likely that no animal has the same highly developed sense of self as that displayed by most humans. Many animals have a sense of “body-ness” or “mine-ness” but not a sense of “I-ness.” Darwin's ideas about evolutionary continuity, together with empirical data (“science sense”) and common sense, will help us learn more about consciousness and self in animals. Answers to challenging questions about animal self-awareness have wide-ranging significance, because they are often used as the litmus test for determining and defending the sorts of treatments to which animals can be morally subjected. (shrink)

Quite a few recent models are rapidly introducing new concepts describing different levels of consciousness. This situation is getting confusing because some theorists formulate their models without making reference to existing views, redundantly adding complexity to an already difficult problem. In this paper, I present and compare nine neurocognitive models to highlight points of convergence and divergence. Two aspects of consciousness seem especially important: perception of self in time and complexity of self-representations. To this I add frequency of self-focus, amount (...) of self-related information, and accuracy of self-knowledge. Overall, I conclude that many novel concepts (e.g., reflective, primary, core, extended, recursive, and minimal consciousness) are useful in helping us distinguish between delicate variations in consciousness and in clarifying theoretical issues that have been intensely debated in the scientific literature—e.g., consciousness in relation to mirror self-recognition and language. Ó 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Information and meaning exist around us and within ourselves, and the same information can correspond to different meanings. This is true for humans and animals, and is becoming true for robots. We propose here an overview of this subject by using a systemic tool related to meaning generation that has already been published (C. Menant, Entropy 2003). The Meaning Generator System (MGS) is a system submitted to a constraint that generates a meaningful information when it receives an incident information that (...) has a relation with the constraint. The content of the meaningful information is explicited, and its function is to trigger an action that will be used to satisfy the constraint of the system. The MGS has been introduced in the case of basic life submitted to a "stay alive" constraint. We propose here to see how the usage of the MGS can be extended to more complex living systems, to humans and to robots by introducing new types of constraints, and integrating the MGS into higher level systems. The application of the MGS to humans is partly based on a scenario relative to the evolution of body self-awareness toward self-consciousness that has already been presented (C. Menant, Biosemiotics 2003, and TSC 2004). The application of the MGS to robots is based on the definition of the MGS applied to robots functionality, taking into account the origins of the constraints. We conclude with a summary of this overview and with themes that can be linked to this systemic approach on meaning generation. (shrink)

Mirrored-self misidentification is the delusional belief that one's own reflection in the mirror is a stranger. In two experiments, we tested the ability of hypnotic suggestion to model this condition. In Experiment 1, we compared two suggestions based on either the delusion's surface features (seeing a stranger in the mirror) or underlying processes (impaired face processing). Fifty-two high hypnotisable participants received one of these suggestions either with hypnosis or without in a wake control. In Experiment 2, we examined the extent (...) to which social cues and role-playing could account for participants' behaviour by comparing the responses of 14 hypnotised participants to the suggestion for impaired face processing (reals) with those of 14 nonhypnotised participants instructed to fake their responses (simulators). Overall, results from both experiments confirm that we can use hypnotic suggestion to produce a compelling analogue of mirrored-self misidentification that cannot simply be attributed to social cues or role-playing. (shrink)

Preston & de Waal are understandably cautious in applying their model to autism. They emphasise multiple cognitive impairments in autism, including prefrontal-executive, cerebellar-attention, and amygdala-emotion recognition deficits. Further empirical examination of imitation ability in autism may reveal deficits in the neural and cognitive basis of perception-action mapping that have a specific relation to the empathic deficit.

Primatologists generally agree that monkeys lack higher-order intentional capacities related to theory of mind. Yet the discovery of the so-called "mirror neurons" in monkeys suggests to many neuroscientists that they have the rudiments of intentional understanding. Given a standard philosophical view about intentional understanding, which requires higher-order intentionahty, a paradox arises. Different ways of resolving the paradox are assessed, using evidence from neural, cognitive, and behavioral studies of humans and monkeys. A decisive resolution to the paradox requires substantial additional empirical (...) work and perhaps a rejection of the standard philosophical view. (shrink)

Research on mirror self-recognition where animals are observed for mirror-guided self-directed behaviour has predominated the empirical approach to self-awareness in nonhuman primates. The ability to direct behaviour to previously unseen parts of the body such as the inside of the mouth, or grooming the eye by aid of mirrors has been interpreted as recognition of self and evidence of a self-concept. Three decades of research has revealed that contrary to monkeys, most great apes have convincingly displayed the capacity to recognize (...) self by mirrors. The putative discontinuity in phylogeny of the ability suggests the existence of a so-called cognitive gap between great apes and the rest of the animal kingdom. However, methodological and theoretical inconsistencies regarding the empirical approach prevail. For instance, the observation of self-directed behaviour might not be as straightforward as it seems. In addition, the interpretation of mirror self-recognition as an index of self-awareness is challenged by alternative explanations, raising doubt about some assumptions behind mirror self-recognition. To evaluate the significance of the test in discussions of the concept of self this paper presents and analyses some major arguments raised on the mirror task. (shrink)

Three priming experiments were conducted to determine how information about the self from different sensory modalities/cognitive domains affects self-face recognition. Being exposed to your body odor, seeing your name, and hearing your name all facilitated self-face recognition in a reaction time task. No similar cross-modal facilitation was found among stimuli from familiar or novel individuals. The finding of a left-hand advantage for self-face recognition was replicated when no primes were presented. These data, along with other recent results suggest the brain (...) processes/represents information about the self in highly integrated ways. (shrink)

One key issue when conceiving the body as a multisensory object is how the cognitive system integrates visible instances of the self and other bodies with one’s own somatosensory processing, to achieve self-recognition and body ownership. Recent research has strongly suggested that shadows cast by our own body have a special status for cognitive processing, directing attention to the body in a fast and highly specific manner. The aim of the present article is to review the most recent scientific contributions (...) addressing how body shadows affect both sensory/perceptual and attentional processes. The review examines three main points: (1) body shadows as a special window to investigate the construction of multisensory body perception; (2) experimental paradigms and related findings; (3) open questions and future trajectories. The reviewed literature suggests that shadows cast by one’s own body promote binding between personal and extrapersonal space and elicit automatic orienting of attention toward the body-part casting the shadow. Future research should address whether the effects exerted by body shadows are similar to those observed when observers are exposed to other visual instances of their body. The results will further clarify the processes underlying the merging of vision and somatosensation when creating body representations. (shrink)