The emergence of a temporally extended self and factors that contribute to its development
Subtitle: from theoretical and empirical perspectives
By: Mary Lazaridis
Series: Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development -- serial no. 307, vol. 78, no. 2; Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development -- v. 78, no. 2.
Publisher: WILEY
Published: 2013
Place of publication: Boston, Masschusetts; Oxford, United Kingdom
Language: eng
Number of pages: 120
ISBN-13: 9781118740040
Subjects: Self in children; Ich-Bewusstsein; Kinderpsychologie
Description: The main aims of the current research were to determine when children develop a temporally extended self (TES) and what factors contribute to its development. However, in order to address these aims it was important to, first, assess whether the test of Delayed Self Recognition (DSR) is a valid measure for the development of the TES, and, second, to propose and evaluate a theoretical model that describes what factors influence the development of the TES. The validity of the DSR test was verified by comparing the performance of 57 children on the DSR test to their performance on a meta-representational task (modified false belief task) and to a task that was essentially the same as the DSR test but was specifically designed to rely on the capacity to entertain secondary representations (i.e., surprise body task). Longitudinal testing of the children showed that at the mental age (MA) of 2.5 years they failed the DSR test, despite training them to understand the intended functions of the medium used in the DSR test; whereas, with training, children at the MA of 3.0 and 3.5 years exhibited DSR. Children at the MA of 4 years exhibited DSR without any training. Finally, results suggest that children's meta-representational ability was the only factor that contributed to the prediction of successful performance on the DSR test, and thus to the emergence of the TES. That is, children of low-elaborative caregivers required significantly more training to pass the DSR test than children of high-elaborative caregivers, indicating that children who received more elaborative conversational input from their caregivers had a more advanced understanding of the TES.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 100-110) and index.
Table of contents: title: Development of a temporally extended self; title: Method; title: Examining the representational demands of the delayed self-recognition task; title: Do 2.5-year-old children have the representational ability for DSR?; title: Examining the developmental transition of the self from its present state to its temporally extended state; title: Effect of mental age on DSR competency; title: The contribution of social, cognitive, and linguistic factors to the development of the TES; title: The contribution of social, cognitive, and linguistic factors to further advances of the TES; title: Methodological considerations and directions for future research.