Understanding the Self and Agency

[laurenfuentes]

In chapter two of the Blackwell Handbook, the author works through the various takes on the development of children’s understanding of the self and others as they act on and with the environment. This was a difficult text to sort through as the author presenting a number of different theories and within these theories, levels of the development of understanding agency and the concept of the self. What made grasping the concrete ideas within the paper all the more difficult were the contradicting findings is some instances such as between Papousek and Papousek and Bahrick and Watson in which infant preferential looking results were directly opposite of each other despite sameness in experimental procedure. Overall though, the text laid a fine groundwork for a discussion of children’s understanding the self and agency as it addressed the gaps in the current research and noted the implications of our current understanding of the topic on other domains of psychological thought.
On page 38, the author addresses the origins of mentalism, proposing two stances rooted in the understanding and application of theory of mind. Tomasello argues that at nine months a child understands agency such that the actions of agents are driven by causal mental states. Gergely and Csibra on the other hand do not find that this understanding is so much rooted in theory of mind as Tomasello is alluding to but rather that such an understanding is viable without the child creating a mental representation of another’s attitudinal relations. While these may seem like contradictory arguments one might relate these two theories to the discussion we often revert to in class, that is whether a child’s ability to perform some action is a function of true knowledge of the concept or if what we see is more the child’s innate ability to perform some action. I do not see these as very different considering the developmental process. What we see as innate is often the base functions for later abilities and complete understanding. As with our innate understanding of small numbers laying the groundwork for our understanding of larger numbers, a child’s ability to understand agency to some degree without creating a representation of another’s mental state lays the groundwork for the development of theory of mind.
As with every developmental step there is always the opportunity for error. I thought that it might be interesting to understand the implications of the development of understanding self and agency by looking at what might go wrong if not developed normally. The author makes a step in this direction as he talks about infantile amnesia as “the lack of a cognitive self-concept before two years of age”. (43) Without this idea of self it might be possible that the memory components of our brain cannot function well enough to create memory. Perhaps memory is created on a relational basis with a personal understanding creating the building blocks for understanding the world surrounding the person. In that case perhaps we need to attain a certain understanding of the world in order to process the information into long-term memory. Along these same lines, perhaps a development of the understanding of self has to do with the creation of representations of others. In this case, without mental representations of others how might we recognize one another (let alone interact)? This idea might play a part in capgras syndrome where an individual cannot recognize faces, or on a more individual basis, in body dismorphic disorder where the individual has a mental representation of their body that does not coincide with their actual appearance.

See you all in class tomorrow!