THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGY
The degree of self-consciousness evident in early childhood provides
another insight into what it’s like to “be” during this period. Rudimen-
tary self-awareness itself emerges at around eighteen months. This can
be tested with the red-dot challenge. If you surreptitiously splodge a one-
year-old’s forehead with red ink and place them in front of a mirror, they
won’t bat an eyelid. They don’t recognize the person staring back at them.
Repeat the stunt with a two-year-old, however, and they’ll immediately
reach for the red dot.
However, this initial self-recognition is far from fully developed self-
consciousness. Before the age of about four, it’s a sense of self that’s
rooted in the present. Show a two-year-old a home movie of his past
self and he’ll see a stranger. Even by three years, children don’t seem
to connect with their previous mental states. Ask a hungry three-year-
old if they’d like a biscuit and most likely they’ll say yes. But if, after
they’ve scoffed a couple, you ask them if they’d wanted those biscuits a
moment ago, they’ll deny they ever did. It’s not that young children can’t
remember the past – you’ll find they’re perfectly able to recall past events
in a factual sense. It’s that they somehow don’t have a sense of owner-
ship over their past selves. To use the terminology from Chapter 4 (on
memory), they don’t yet have a fully functional autobiographical memory
that places them at the heart of an unfolding narrative. It’s a similar story
for the future, with the consequence that three-year-olds are hopeless at
predicting their future needs. Whereas a four- or five-year-old will select
sunglasses over a scarf for a trip to a sunny beach, a three-year-old will
be as likely to choose the scarf.
Self-control is another key indicator of how an infant experiences the
world. The human brain doesn’t mature uniformly (unlike the brains of
monkeys and other primates). In particular, the front of the brain respon-
sible for self-control – the “prefrontal cortex” – is late to develop, and does
not catch up with other regions, such as the auditory cortex, until about
four years of age. According to a 2009 paper by Sharon Thompson-Schill
and her colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, while this feature
of human development has obvious disadvantages for planning and
controlling behaviour, these are outweighed by advantages for learning.
Imagine you are watching a tennis match (a game you know nothing
about) and that at each point played, you are asked to estimate whether a
player will come forward to the net. As an adult you observe the statistical
probabilities during play and, based on this, on ten percent of occasions
you predict the player will come forward, and on ninety percent that
they’ll stay on the baseline. This is known as probability matching and
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