Self-awareness and other-awareness. II: Mirror self-recognition, social contingency awareness, and synchronic imitation.

Abstract

Eighteen-month-old children were tested for mirror self-recognition using the classic rouge test or an alternative procedure, for social contingency awareness by being closely imitated for a long time, and for the capacity for communication bysynchronic mitation. The classic mirror ouge test was shown to produce false negatives. Most recognizers and nonrecognizers became aware of being imi-tated and imitated the activity of a model, but only recognizers engaged in sustained synchronic imitation of the model. The results upport our hypothesis that self-recognition a d spontaneous perspective-taking develop in close synchrony because both require a capacity for secondary representation. During the second year of life, children's ocial-cognitive competence shows a dramatic increase. They begin (a) to rec-ognize themselves in mirrors (Lewis & Brooks-Gunn, 1979), (b) to react self-consciously when in the center of others ' atten-tion (Lewis, Sullivan, Stanger, & Weiss, 1989), (c) to react with empathic behavior to victims of distress (Zahn-Waxler, Radke-Yarrow, & King, 1979), (d) to communicate with peers pre-