Self-awareness in animals and humans

Are human infants born with an innate sense of self? How does that sense of self change as they develop? How do great apes compare to human infants and children in their sense of self? Are they capable of embarrassment? What kind of self-awareness do monkeys have? Do they recognize their own images in mirrors? Do dolphins? Do pigeons? These are some of the many questions addressed in Self-awareness in Animals and Humans, a collection of original articles on self-awareness in monkeys, apes, humans, and other species, including dolphins. This volume, which grew out of an interdisciplinary conference on self-awareness, focuses on controversies about how to measure self-awareness, which species are capable of self-awareness and which are not, and why. Several articles focus on the controversial question of whether gorillas, like other great apes and human infants, are capable of mirror self-recognition (MSR) or whether they are anomalously unable to do so. Other articles focus on whether macaque monkeys are capable of MSR. Various contributors present competing theories about which abilities accompany and underlie MSR and which capacities underlie developmentally earlier forms of self-detection in human infants. The focus of the articles is both comparative and developmental: Several contributions explore the value of frameworks from human developmental psychology for comparative studies. In particular, various contributors present differing opinions concerning the relationship between MSR and object permanence, imitation, and theory of mind. This dual focus - comparative and developmental - reflects the interdisciplinary nature of the volume, which brings together biological anthropologists, comparative and developmental psychologists, and cognitive scientists from Japan, France, Spain, Hungary, New Zealand, Scotland, and the United States.