Dora Kampis | Understanding the self-other perspective in human development

Coordinating self and other is an essential part of human interactions, and therefore of our mental lives. In young infants, recent theoretical proposals (Southgate, 2020) and empirical evidence (Kampis & Kovacs, 2022, Manea et al., 2023) points to an altercentric bias in encoding the world: infants show a pronounced focus on the perspectives of others, and do not seem to encode mental states as specific to individuals (Kampis et al, 2013). The onset of differentiating between self and other perspective, and of binding perspectives to individuals, may be linked to the emergence of self-awareness in the second year of life, predicting a decrease of altercentrism around infants’ second birthday.

In my talk, I will present data supporting an altercentric bias in human infants, discuss how increased self-other differentiation and a decrease in altercentrism may be linked to the emerging self, and how self-other differentiation may be linked to interpersonal alignment and coordination in infants and children. I will end with a speculative proposal that the developing understanding of self-other perspective and input from joint attention and remembering interactions may contribute to the emergence of episodic memories in early childhood.