Developing a conscious mind: from error-monitoring at 12 months to self-awareness at 18 months?

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Cécile Gal¹ (cgg@psy.ku.dk), Katarina Begus¹; ¹Centre for Early Childhood Cognition, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

The human adult mind boasts a remarkably complex thinking machinery relying on multiple levels reflection, from local error-monitoring to higher information integration and conscious thinking. Yet, how these functions develop and build on each other in a developing brain remains unknown. Here, we investigated the link between error-detection and behavioural adaptation in 124 12-month-old infants with a novel match-to-sample task using EEG and gaze-contingent eye-tracking, and mirror self-recognition six months later. Infants controlled the stimulus presentation. They first viewed three cards (two visible and one face-down), then revealed the third card by looking at it, and matched it with one of the initial cards. Match-difficulty varied across four levels. Our results replicate a finding that 12-month-olds show metacognitive monitoring (Goupil & Kouider, 2016): their brain activity exhibits an Error-Related Negativity (ERN) after incorrect responses (p = 0.015). Moreover, infants showed metacognitive control: they adapted their behaviour and explored more before deciding on difficult trials (p = 0.043), and (for high-performing infants) following errors (p = 0.027). Importantly, we found a connection between early metacognition and later self-awareness: infants who passed the mirror self-recognition test at 18 months showed a significant ERN at 12 months (p = 0.008), while those who failed didn’t. Metacognitive abilities therefore appear already functional at 12 months both for monitoring errors and adapting behaviour and may contribute to the development of self-awareness. This suggests conscious awareness could stem from an early error-detection core function, gradually leading to various capacities such as self-awareness (Oudeyer & Kaplan, 2007).

Topic Area: THINKING: Development & aging