Knowra Self-awareness Self-awareness Self-awareness is the capacity to represent or recognize oneself as distinct from the surrounding world. It ranges from immediate bodily self-recognition to reflective knowledge of one’s traits and mental states.
Self-consciousness : Awareness of oneself as an object of attention, thought, or evaluation. It names the reflective form of self-awareness that involves considering oneself.
Mirror test : A behavioral test that examines whether an animal uses a mirror to inspect a mark on its own body. It offers a practical test of visual self-recognition, though not of every form of self-awareness.
Rochat's levels of self-awareness : A developmental framework describing increasingly complex forms of self-awareness in infancy and childhood. It traces how bodily differentiation can develop into recognition of oneself as an object.
Consciousness : The condition of having subjective experience or awareness. Conscious experience is broader than awareness specifically directed toward oneself.
Body schema : The largely unconscious representation of the body’s position and possible movements. It supplies bodily information that helps distinguish one’s body from the surrounding world.
Rubber hand illusion : An illusion in which synchronized visual and tactile cues can make a rubber hand feel like one’s own. It demonstrates how sensory integration shapes the experience of bodily ownership.
Autism spectrum : A group of neurodevelopmental conditions involving differences in social communication, behavior, and sensory processing. Research on autism probes how self-representation relates to social understanding without equating the two.
Self-knowledge : Knowledge a person has about their own traits, motives, abilities, and mental states. It is a reflective product of self-awareness, but can be incomplete or inaccurate.
Proprioception : The sense of the body’s position and movement, arising from receptors in muscles, tendons, and joints. It provides continuous information about the body without requiring reflective thought.
Efference copy : A copy of a motor command used to predict the sensory consequences of an action. Predicted consequences help distinguish sensations caused by one’s own actions from external events.
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