Читать книгу Lifespan Development - Tara L. Kuther - Страница 335

Maya, 4 months of age, delights in seeing that she can make the mobile above her crib move by kicking her feet. Her understanding that she can influence her world suggests that she has a sense of herself as different from her environment (Rochat, 1998). Before infants can take responsibility for their own actions, they must begin to see themselves as physically separate from the world around them.

Some developmental researchers believe that infants are born with a capacity to distinguish the self from the surrounding environment (Meltzoff, 1990). Newborns show distress at hearing a recording of another infant’s cries but do not show distress at hearing their own cries, suggesting that they can distinguish other infants’ cries from their own and thereby have a primitive notion of self (Dondi, Simion, & Caltran, 1999). Newborns’ facial imitation, that is, their ability to view another person’s facial expression and produce it (see Chapter 4), may also suggest a primitive awareness of self and others (Meltzoff, 2007; Rochat, 2013). It is unclear, however, whether these findings suggest that newborns have self-awareness because infants cannot tell us what they know.

Others argue that an awareness of oneself is not innate but emerges by 3 months of age (Neisser, 1993). Some researchers believe that this emergence is indicated by infants’ awareness of the consequences of their own actions on others (Langfur, 2013). As infants interact with people and objects, they learn that their behaviors have effects. With this awareness, they begin to experiment to see how their behaviors influence the world around them, begin to differentiate themselves from their environments, and develop a sense of self (Bigelow, 2017).