Understanding Self

We investigate how cognition becomes organized around the self and how self-related capacities bear on broader questions of human cognitive distinctiveness. A central focus is the department’s work on metarepresentational capacity, self-recognition, and multimodal self-concepts. Across this area, developmental research examines how self-related capacities emerge across childhood, cross-cultural research tests whether these transitions are robust across societies and developmental settings, and comparative research asks which precursors are shared with other great apes and where human cognition diverges.