Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Volume 7, Issue 9, September 2003, Pages 397-402
Journal home page for Trends in Cognitive Sciences

On being the object of attention: implications for self–other consciousness

https://doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(03)00191-8Get rights and content

Abstract

Joint attention to an external object at the end of the first year is typically believed to herald the infant's discovery of other people's attention. I will argue that mutual attention in the first months of life already involves an awareness of the directedness of attention. The self is experienced as the first object of this directedness followed by gradually more distal ‘objects’. This view explains early infant affective self-consciousness within mutual attention as emotionally meaningful, rather than as bearing only a spurious similarity to that in the second and third years of life. Such engagements precede and must inform, rather than derive from, conceptual representations of self and other, and can be better described as self–other conscious affects.

Section snippets

The awareness of others' attention in the first year

When do human infants become aware of others' attention? Here, I will present what I take to be some of the central evidence of awareness of others' attention within a variety of engagement contexts especially that of mutual attention.

The developing objects of others' attention

The ‘primordial sharing situation’ of the infant and mother [24] seems to become elaborated in systematic ways (Table 1). Such evidence suggests that the infant is emotionally aware of the attention of others from very early in life; what appears to be developing is an awareness of the objects to which others' attention can be directed: the first of these is the self, followed by what the self does, then what the self perceives, and then what the self remembers. There is also evidence of

Affective self-consciousness

One common indicator – both in life and in science – of telling when someone is aware of another's attention is affective self-consciousness, the most socially salient of which are hiding the self in shyness, embarrassment or coyness, or exposing the self in showing-off or preening; both are usually a response to attention [30]. Adopting the view that one cannot feel self-conscious until one has a self to feel conscious about, Lewis argues that the earliest self-conscious affects

Continuities and developments in affective self-consciousness

The emotional reactions of coyness and showing-off precede the emergence of conceptual representations of the self. There are parallels between the simple hiding and exposing of the self in the first few months and the hiding and exposing of its actions in the second half of the first year, and there are continuities throughout the first 3 years in embarrassment-like and pride-like displays. If it were the case that until explicit representations of the self developed there could be no

Self–other conscious affects

One solution to these theoretical contradictions could be to re-consider the terminology we are using. Because embarrassment is deemed a self-conscious emotion in English, we might be imposing an explicit focus on self. It could be the case that in some emotion experiences, which could be described as more world-focused than self-focused (including some ‘self-conscious’ ones), there is awareness of the self but only implicitly, mainly as a ground and as perceptually recessive [38]. I suggest

Some objections and counterarguments

There could be alternative explanations of these phenomena that pose objections to the explanation offered here. One such could be that the earlier behaviours are akin to fixed action patterns, merely hard-wired into the organism to create the appearance of emotionality to elicit care-giving responses in adults. Another could be that behaviours of the very young infant might look like those of the toddler but be governed by very different processes and in no way need be interpreted as

A second-person approach to awareness of self and other

Contradictions in evaluating the significance of infant emotional reactions to others' attention and confusion in theoretical models of developing self-awareness and other-awareness might be reduced by the adoption of a second-person (i.e. an I–you rather than I–she/he) perspective [42]. The apparent mystery of how infants bridge the gap between first-person experience (I see, feel or think) and third-person observation (she/he does) is no longer a mystery if one posits second-person engagement

Conclusion

I have argued that infants are aware of the directedness of others' attention before evidence of joint attention. The self is experienced as the first object of this directedness. The perception of attention in others could begin with, and be shaped by, the experience of being an object of attention to others. I argue that developments in awareness of attention during the first 2 years can be explained in terms of an expanding awareness of the objects of attention. This view can explain early

Acknowledgments

With undying gratitude to Doug Brandon, Kevan Bundell, Alan Costall, Peter Hobson, Sue Leekam, Jaak Panksepp, Chris Sinha and Colwyn Trevarthen.

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