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This analysis presents a new mechanistic account of self-awareness in infants, integrating interoceptive signals and social cognition.
Our capacity to think about ourselves is a developmental achievement that, when itemerges, profoundly changes cognition. Currently, there are no mechanistic accounts ofwhere a concept of self could come from and empirical investigation withincontemporary developmental science is surprisingly absent. Drawing on a wealth ofdata from cognitive neuroscience and developmental psychology, I propose a newmechanistic account of the ontogeny of self-awareness anchored in infants’interoceptive signals. However, this is a social cognitive account in which infants’expectations about others’ attention are deeply entwined with the modulating effectthat others’ attention has on infants’ awareness of their interoceptive state and whichtogether provide the impetus for infants to generate a conceptual representation of selfde novo.
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Victoria Southgate (2025) studied this question.
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