Self-Perception and Self-Conception

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Butterworth's article addresses a topic that is both interesting and important: the origins of self-knowledge. Using some of J. J. Gibson's ideas, he argues that awareness of the self begins very early in life and is based in direct perception of the self (proprioception) through all modalities. He goes on to suggest that perceptual specification of the self may form the basis for a later self-concept. This is an important idea, because it acknowledges the continuity between direct perception and other human modes of knowing, including those that involve symbolizing. Certainly, one of the persistent problems of J. J. Gibson's ecological approach to perception is that of accounting for phenomena that are usually called conceptual (cf. Pick & Heinrichs, 1989). Thus, I welcome Butterworth's attempt to bridge the developmental gap between early awareness of the self (as object and actor) and more sophisticated understanding of the I also welcome his emphasis on the infant's ability to perceive the self directly in ways. Nevertheless, although I am quite in sympathy with this general approach, I am puzzled by some aspects of Butterworth's argument linking selfperception with self-concept. Through his review of research on infant development, Butterworth demonstrates very nicely that even the youngest infants give evidence of self-perception in several modalities. Unfortunately, thereafter his argument is in some respects inconsistent with the premises he seems to adopt in his discussion of J. J. Gibson's theory and its application to self-awareness. There is a shift in viewpoint that is difficult to reconcile: Whereas some primitive, bodily aspects of the self are supposed to be directly perceived, the meaningful aspects of the self are dealt with by means of representations. For example, having agreed with Gibson about the earliest basis for self-awareness, he goes on to accept, uncritically, that mirror behaviors such as those exhibited in the markedface task with young children, must necessarily be explained by some higher level mechanism (i.e., self-concept, selfrepresentations, etc.). Similarly, in his discussion of movingroom studies with infants, he seems to say that the infant falls down because misleading, perceptual information has not yet been overcome by objective conceptual knowledge of self. In general, his argument is that the infant's developmental task is to replace reliance on bad, misleading perceptual information with good, conceptual knowledge. For several reasons, I do not agree. I do not see why perceptual information is good and veridical for specifying the self as actor in the environment, but bad and misleading for specifying the self in other ways. This seems to me to be a version of the ancient and by now somewhat worn-out distinction between appearance and reality, which assumes that perception is not veridical, because it is based on shifting and subjective sensations; it thus also assumes that perception is indirect. J. J. Gibson (1966, 1979/1986) argued that perception is always veridical, but that perceivers sometimes do not pick up all the information they need and so are unable to act effectively. This seems to be the case for the infants in the moving room, who perceive a change in their own orientation based on visual information, but do not make use of other available information (e.g., kinesthetic information). Under ordinary conditions, perceptual learning takes place, and the perceiver becomes more skilled at picking up the necessary information to guide action (E. J. Gibson, 1969). This process seems to me to be essential to many of the achievements of infancy, including such things as maintaining an upright posture while moving. However, Butterworth deals quite differently with the development of increasing skill at such activities. He connects Butterworth and Cicchetti's (1978) finding that infants became more skilled with increasing age in the moving-room situation with the idea that they are beginning to attribute an independent cause to the discrepant visual feedback. Why not simply say that perceptual learning has taken place? At the same time, Butterworth makes a statement with which I do agree: . . perceptual specification of self is embedded within congruent self-knowledge, in those old enough and with the cognitive capacities to have acquired it. It is not a form of information for self that we outgrow. This statement leads in a more fruitful direction, because it suggests something of the way in which perceptual understanding and conceptual understanding might be developmentally related. However, it leaves open the question of whether the relation between the two is continuous or discontinuous. Butterworth, like most others, seems to endorse the latter idea. Pick and Heinrichs (1989), by contrast, argued for the continuity of perceptual and conceptual understanding: