Location: Zoom

Time: 6:00pm – 7:30pm

Dora Kampis (Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark)

The Development of Understanding Self and Other

Coordinating self and other is an essential part of human interactions, and therefore of our mental lives. In young infants, recent theoretical proposals (Southgate, 2020) and empirical evidence (Kampis & Kovacs, 2022, Manea et al., 2023) point to an altercentric bias in encoding the world. Infants show a pronounced focus on the perspectives of others, and do not seem to encode mental states as specific to individuals (Kampis et al, 2013). The onset of differentiating between self and other perspective, and of binding perspectives to individuals, may be linked to the emergence of self-awareness in the second year of life, and consequently to a decrease of altercentrism around infants’ second birthday.

In my talk, I will present data supporting an altercentric bias in human infancy, discuss how increased self-other differentiation and a decrease in altercentrism may be linked to the emerging self-awareness, and how self-other differentiation may be linked to interpersonal alignment and coordination in infants and children. I will end with a speculative proposal that the developing understanding of self-other perspective and input from joint attentional and remembering interactions might contribute, via binding perspectives to individuals, to the emergence of full-blown episodic memories in early childhood.

Please request the zoom link from: pina(at)fh-potsdam.de