patterns of interpersonal relations and exploratory initiatives might become
dysfunctional—children behaving as overly shy or lacking agency (as in
Ainsworth’s insecurely attached children–see the following). Because this
lack of interpersonal openness and agency affects later experiences, the cog-
nitive and executive repertoires of children will become progressively more
affected as time proceeds. Affective goals and emotions influence consider-
ably life choices and opportunities adopted or rejected by children, thus
codetermining children’s cognition and life course.
THE ROLE OF MENTAL ATTENTION
IN MOTIVATIONAL PROCESSES
The Emergence of Motives
In this section, we examine the role of mental attention in the emergence of
motives. Motives appear very early in a human’s life; securely attached babies
always are motivated. A clear expression of distinct motives that condition
cognitive goals comes to full flower only in the second year, however, when at
about 18 months the baby can represent its own object of experience and its
own subject of experience (i.e., when his or her consciousness can first experi-
ence self as distinct from the object–situation). This is a primitive self, which
we callself1(Pascual-Leone, 2000b), the level of self-consciousness that oth-
ers call by terms such as primary consciousness (Edelman & Tononi, 2000) or
core consciousness (Damasio, 1999). At this time, clearly distinct motives,
such as attachment appear (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978). As
Oerter (2000, p. 65) emphasized: “attachment behavior seems to emerge in ev-
ery society around the age of one to one-and-a-half years(Waters, Vaughn,
Posada, & Kondo-Ikemura, 1995).”
This is due, we claim, to the mental attention needed to boost (i.e.,
hyperactivate) schemes that constitute the infrastructure of the motive in
question, so as to allow it to be internalized–learned as a relational structural
invariant (i.e., a distinct motivational scheme). Indeed, to cognitively con-
struct the motive of attachment as an invariant (and thus potentially become
conscious of it), the baby must be able to coordinate simultaneously four or
five sensorimotor schemes (see Table 8.1). These are:
Scheme #1: motherOB: Thepersonal(i.e., affective and cognitive)ob
schemeof the mother: This is the representational structure (complex scheme)
of the mother as a personal object of desire, a protector, caring company, etc.
We postfixOBto the name of this complex scheme to signify that it functions
as a predicative operative scheme, which applies to(i.e., assimilates, in
216 PASCUAL-LEONE AND JOHNSON