Research
My research is aimed at understanding how social development unfolds, and how the social environment makes this development possible. We conduct interdisciplinary research at the intersection of psychological, developmental and brain sciences, and believe that only by approaching development across multiple levels of analysis, can we hope to understand the complex interaction between brain, behaviour and the environment in which a child grows.
The emergence of self consciousness
An existential feature of human experience is a sense of “self” that provides stability and continuity to the flow of subjective experience across space and time. Many species likely have consciousness, but the ability to subject ourselves to conscious awareness is often considered the pinnacle of human consciousness. There is, however, little evidence that self-consciousness is present at birth, and considerable evidence that the ability to think about ourselves emerges gradually during the first few years of life.
How this happens - from changes in the brain and neurochemistry to the different kinds of input that infants experience from their caregivers and their own exploratory behaviour - is the focus of new projects in our lab. In one of these projects, we explore how synchronous interactions between infants and their caregivers might be implicated in the development of a sense of self. This project tests a hypothesis that greater levels of caregiver-infant synchrony (e.g. during extended periods of carrying or face-to-face interactions) fosters an overlap between self and other, which may contribute to the relatively late development of self-awareness in human infants. We have argued that this rather late development of self-awareness may - counterintuiviely - foster optimal conditions for infant learning, by allowing them to direct their attention towards others (for more elaboration of this hypothesis, see below, altercentric cognition)
The self in early cognitive development
See:
Yeung, E., Askitis, D., & Southgate, V. (2022) Emerging self-representation presents a challenge for young children’s perspective tracking. Open Mind, 6, 232-249.
Kampis, D., Grosse Wiesmann, C., Koop, S., & Southgate, V. (2022). Understanding the self in relation to others: infants spontaneously map others’ face to their own at 16 to 26 months. Developmental Science, 2022;25:313197.
Bulgarelli, C., Blasi, A., de Klerk, C.C.J.M., Richards, J.E., Hamilton, A., & Southgate, V. (2019). Fronto-temporoparietal connectivity and self-awareness in 18-month-olds: A resting state fNIRS study. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 38, 100676.
Much of our recent work has investigated the role of a developing self in cognitive development. Very little work in developmental science has asked how the milestone of self-awareness might change other aspects of cognition. Our recent work suggests that the emergence of the ability to think about the self, between 18 and 24 months of age, has profound implications for cognition.
We typically measure self-representation, or the ability to think about the self, with the mirror self-recognition test. This involves putting a small mark on the infant’s face and asking whether they touch the mark when they are placed in front of a mirror. Although on the surface, this is a measure of physical self-recognition, lots of research suggests that infants who have achieved this milestone exhibit other behaviours that suggest that they are able to think about the self, like the use of personal pronoun use and the ability to compare the self with the other. This latter ability - self-other comparison - we think is likely only possible once infants have the capacity for self-representation and may be the origins of ingroup preferences that are pervasive in human cognition throughout life.
Our work in this area has shown that at 18 months, infants who exhibit evidence of self-representation - but not infants who do not - experience a conflict between self and other when perspectives diverge. We have suggested that the relatively late development of self allows very young infants to circumvent the need to deal with conflicting perspectives, making it easier for them to track other people’s perspectives.
We have also shown that 18-month-olds who already have a self-representation have greater functional connectivity between regions of the brain that have been implicated in self-related processing.
Altercentric cognition
See:
Southgate, V. (2020). Are infants altercentric? The other and the self in early social cognition. Psychological Review, 127(4), 505-523.
Kampis, D. & Southgate, V. (2020). Altercentric cognition: how the presence of others influences our cognitive processing. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 24(11), 945-959.
Manea, V., Kampis, D., Grosse Wiesmann, C., Revencu, B., & Southgate, V. (2023) An initial but receding altercentric bias in preverbal infants’ memory. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 290:20230738.
Young children have a reputation for being egocentric, and unable to see the world from other people’s perspectives.
With a grant funded by the ERC, we have spent the last years testing a novel hypothesis about infancy; that it is a period when – because there is not yet any established sense of self – infants are predominantly focused on others, to the extent that we can describe them as altercentric – not egocentric as the field has historically assumed.