SELFiE · Becoming me: how does the infant brain construct a self?

Our capacity for self-awareness is often considered a defining feature of human consciousness and in adulthood allows us to imagine how others see us, recollect our past and contemplate our future. Our work has shown that in infancy, the emergence of a self-representation profoundly changes developing cognition. Yet, there are currently no mechanistic accounts of how it could develop, and empirical investigation within contemporary developmental science is surprisingly absent. In the current proposal, I put forward the first mechanistic account of the development of a self-representation, drawing upon recent data from cognitive neuroscience. This new account articulates a biological foundation that captures the idea that it is in detecting oneself as the target of another person’s attention that a concept of self emerges. I propose a pathway through which caregiver communicative cues towards infants – particularly direct gaze – give rise to a belonging to the body feeling state via their modulating effect on the heartbeat and its afferent cortical representation. Motivated by a bias to seek the targets of others’ gaze, a concept of self emerges from filling a placeholder target with this feeling state. This theory will be tested in 4 interlinked projects. Project 1 examines the longitudinal relationship between early interoception and a conceptual self-representation; Project 2 tests the novel hypothesis that direct gaze alerts infants to their interoceptive signals and Project 3 builds on this to test the claim that early in life, infants encode direct gaze as 'about me' which then fosters the inclusion of new self-related events in a reinforcing loop. Project 4 adds a crucial cross-cultural comparison capitalizing on natural variability in caregiving to test the model described in this proposal. This project seeks to fill a crucial gap in our understanding of development, essential for any theory that seeks to fully explain human consciousness.