Lecture 7 - Self Awareness (13:21 min) - Sensation, Perception, Attention and Awareness

Okay, so this, this is honestly one of my favorite lectures.

I'm looking forward to giving this one to you.

it really relates back to a memory I have of being a graduate student at University

of Waterloo. And we were taught all through my

graduate career essentially how to find problems with research projects.

So we would constantly look at various experiments and try to kind of take them

apart, critically analyze them. And find out why maybe we didn't

necessarily want to believe what the author was telling us, or at least what

other studies we might want to perform. So, within this context, this critical

analysis context, we heard one day that there was this person going to come and

speak to us. A person named Gordon Gallow, and he was

going to talk about scientifically studying the self.

And as graduate students we were, we almost couldn't wait to tear into this,

because we thought wow, it's almost impossible to scientifically study the

self. This is going to be very easy.

However, it turned out that Gordon had a very fascinating story.

The story I'm going to relate to you. And while yes, you can still find

alternate explanations it's also pretty compelling stuff.

So so let me take you through that story. But just before I do, let me point out

why we're doing this story now. We've been talking about perception, and

how we perceive the world in our head. But of course we do that because we

ultimately are going to act and we, that concept, me, myself, is critical in terms

of that. We are playing a starring role in all of

our thoughts. So, we're looking at the world around us

we're also thinking about our goals, what we hope to get, what we hope to achieve.

And then, ultimately, we're trying to figure out how best to perform in this

world to achieve the goals we want. So that concept of us is central to

virtually everything we do. and, and so.

It's really cool if we could understand it better.

Alright, so, now, let me give you Gordon's story.

Week three, lecture seven. nice little guy looking at himself in the

mirror. The question is, what does he see?

Okay. When he's looking in this mirror.

Well, it is about mirrors. This is the interesting, first thing that

Gordon kind of said. And I, and it'll burn in my mind forever,

I think. He said, mirrors are essentially

unnatural objects that yes, you can imagine that in the wild an animal may

see its reflection in a body of water like you see here.

But this is actually probably a very rare occurrence.

It would only occur with a very flat body of water, and it's unclear that the

animal would you know, really be looking at that reflection much at all.

They're probably worried about quenching their thirst.

So, they're mostly drinking which is causing ripples and et cetera.

but we, on the other hand, have created these mirrors and use them in very

explicit ways to inspect ourselves. That's the concept of self.

So, as the story goes, Gordon himself had a graduate student who was trying to

think of a good thesis project to do while shaving, and noticing and thinking

about mirrors. And he kind of had that thought.

Wow, mirrors are kind of unnatural. I wonder what would happen if I were to

expose animals to mirrors. And so there was an animal lab and they

decided to do exactly that. Let's start hanging mirrors in the

various animal's cages and let's see what happens.

what they found is, what happened depended on the animal and there was

essentially kind of three levels that an animal might reach.

but not all of them would reach the third level for sure and some of them would

never even make it to the second level. Okay, so, what are these levels?

The first level is, when an animal is first exposed to it's own reflection.

It almost always treat it like it's another member of it's own species, a

different, you know, not itself, some other member.

So, for example, with dogs, quite often when they first see their reflection in a

mirror, they will react to it like it's another dog.

So, if your dog is at all anxious, it will tend to bark and, you know, kind of

do all that kind of anxiety kind of behavior at its reflection.

if it's a real friendly dog, it might come over with its tail wagging in a very

social kind of way. But it seems at least at first that it

just thinks this is another dog and that seems to be standard of all animals.

That's their first reaction, this is like another member of my species so whatever

they would do If another member of the species had

arrived in their cage that's how they'd behave.

However, many animals including dogs reach a second step, that second step is

what we sometimes call habituation. Essentially they have been seeing this

reflection, but this reflection has come to become sort of boring to them.

It doesn't do anything. The presence of the reflection doesn't

signal that anything good is going to happen or that anything bad is going to

happen. It's just there, there's no social

interaction with it. You know, it's just this kind of weird

thing. It doesn't smell like anything.

It doesn't manipulate the world around it.

and so ultimately, a lot of animals just come to ignore it.

Many dogs, if you have a full length mirror in your house.

Many dogs, and I believe, many cats will simply walk by it, but will not, you will

not see their eyes drawn to the reflection after a while, it just is like

it doesn't exist. so that, we call habituation, it's the

same thing as the creaks in your house that you first heard.

But eventually, you don't hear them because they don't predict anything,

they're not important stimulating. So, a lot of animals will reach to that

second habituation stage and stop there. Now a few animals, and the first ones

being noted were the, were some of the higher apes like chimps.

A few animals will use the mirror once they, once they reach that sort of

habituation okay, it's not harming me, then they take another step.

And they seem to behave with the mirror as though they realize it's a reflection

of themselves. That is, they start to use the mirror as

a tool. They might look at their teeth, they

might turn around and look at their butt, which is always funny, but I always like

to remind all you guys, you've all done it.

It's not like you haven't looked at your butt in the mirror.

The mirror allows us to see parts of ourselves that we don't normally see.

and so we use it that way. You know, much sort of as she's using it

here. but, but you could use it to literally

inspect parts of your body you couldn't normally see.

And so you see chimps for example doing that, and it looks as though they realize

that what they're looking at is a reflection of themself.

Okay, well that's nice and provocative, but how do you do this more formally?

Well, Gordon actually developed something that's generally called the Rouge Test,

or the Mirror Test now. he developed it first with chimps.

And it would work as follows. He would, first put a mirror in a cage

where chimps were. And let them get used to the mirror.

Let them go through these various stages. and once they've kind of reached that

stage where they seemed, they seemed to understand that was their reflection.

Then he would wait until they needed some surgical procedure.

So, so occasionally you have to say, give a chimp dental work or something like

that, or generally for the health, so you might anesthetize them.

And when you anesthetize them, so they're out cold, now what Gordon would do is put

a little bit of red dye on one eye ridge. And on one ear.

Okay, and purposefully not have anything on the other eye ridge and the other ear.

And he was careful to make sure that this dye didn't smell like anything, didn't

have any tactile irritation to it. So, the animal without a mirror should

have no idea this was done. So, the animal is now brought back to the

cage. Allowed to recover from the surgery, and

then is allowed to look at itself in the mirror.

And the question is, what does it do? And, what it does, kind of is exemplified

in this picture, is it will typically look in the mirror, and it will start

touching these marked areas. With a lo-, expression on it's face like,

what the heck is on my face, what is this stuff?

And so it, and, and it touches these marked areas many more times than it

touches the unmarked areas. So, the unmarked areas provide a control,

just you know, how often does it touch it's face, generally?

And we know that it touches the marked areas a lot more, so like it's trying to

figure out what that marked area is. Is that overwhelming evidence that it's

self aware? Well, there's some alternative theories,

but it seems you know, pretty, pretty strong.

a lot of other animals do not pass this test.

So, so the question is, you know, will other animals mark it.

I think, animals like elephants do. Most of the great apes do.

In variants used on dolphins, they pass. But dogs, for example, do not.

If you put some mark on them somewhere and then allow them to, to see themselves

in the mirror. most dogs will just again continue to

ignore that mirror and continue to ignore the image.

They will never seem to make that realization.

What the heck is on me? I want to get that off me.

They don't do it, but dolphins do, great apes do, elephants do, you know, many of

the usual suspects do. and so it's a really kind of a

fascinating test, and it really makes us question how unique self-awareness is to

humans. What about humans?

Well, human children are kind of interesting.

They will go through stages early in their life.

They seem to be behaving to the mirror image as though it's just another baby.

They react the same way as they would to another baby, so much like that first

stage in the, in the animal kingdom. But when they get to be over a year but

under two, somewhere in that period, they will often go through a little period

where they're avoiding the mirror image. That if you try to show them themselves

in the mirror, they, they, they seem to feel uncomfortable or react uncomfortably

towards it. Almost like they're not quite sure what

it is. They, they seem to realize that it

follows their motions and it seems to creep them out a little bit in a way.

But somewhere around a year and a half to 20 months to 24 months.

Somewhere in that latter half of their second year of life, they seem to make

this leap and understand that that is them.

So, they will pass the Rouge test. You can do the same rouge test that you

did on animals with babies or with young children.

And they will pass, you know, somewhere between a year and a half and two years

old. you, they also do experiments like the

following. The child is looking in a mirror, and

while they're looking in a mirror You lower a toy behind their head.

So, the child will see this toy in the mirror, but the question is do they reach

forward for the toy as if they think it's where they see it.

Or are they able to kind of encode things and say "okay wait a minute that's me in

the mirror". The toy is behind me.

So that means it's over here. So, do they actually look back to get the

toy or do they go forward for it and again about a year and a half or two

years old they go back for it. So, they seem to understand what's in the

mirror, including themselves. Fascinating.

so, that's, you know, when our star is born so to speak.

Now, now that also means, you know, for the first year and a half, it's unclear

how much of a sense of self the child has.

It's also, by the way, around two or not too long after that when they start,

they, they will respond to their name prior to that.

You know, they can be alerted if you call out their name they'll look to it.

But it seems to be at that age they start to kind of understand, I am that person.

So, it seems like that's when they start to form their concept of who they are.

Okay. All of this stuff works best if you

actually see it in action. So oops, so here's some videos.

Check out the mirror self recognition. This is mostly on children.

But here's a, a, sort of expanded discussion of it in terms of apes and ape

cognition. And in fact, I found a whole YouTube

channel devoted to the mirror test, so there's all sorts of videos with

dolphins, and various other things that you can check out.

Get a sense of it, think about that and there's also a blog post here that I

thought was pretty good. showing you some of the issues with

respect to the self emerging in children. So, check those out, think about it,

think about yourself. Very cool.

Now you have a good idea of yourself. Let's talk about the representation you

form of others. That's next, when we talk about theory of

mind.

Lecture 7 - Self Awareness (13:21 min)

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