Reflecting on the past: Temporal extensions in visual self-recognition

Empirical attempts to assess self-awareness frequently rely on tests of visual-self recognition, wherein individuals are marked without their knowledge and exposed to their mirror image. There is, however, wide debate over what this test measures. For example, one aspect of the self that the standard test fails to assess is its temporally continuous nature. To address this, previous research has presented children with delayed video footage of the marking event. While 2-year-olds demonstrate both face and leg selfrecognition with mirror feedback, only by 4 were children found to recognise themselves in delayed video. This developmental asynchrony may be due to a general video deficit, as children have limited exposure to this medium compared to mirrors. In order to avoid the confounds associated with video feedback, the current study introduced a novel paradigm wherein a selfrecognition task developed by Nielsen, Suddendorf and Slaughter (2006) was adapted to examine the development of a capacity to link past and present visual representations. Three-year-olds were placed in a pair of grey track pants while sitting in a high chair and then given 30-seconds to inspect them. A control group was tested on leg self-recognition immediately following this period. The test group was instead distracted for three minutes in another room following familiarisation, before returning to the high chair to be tested. As expected, nearly all (10/11) children in the control group demonstrated self-recognition. Ten of 17 3-year-olds in the test group passed the selfrecognition task, suggesting a capacity to link past and present visual representations. Interestingly, performance on this task was unrelated to a verbal measure of similar abilities