ABSTRACT
Awareness of self and others continues to develop, and between the ages of three and five years humans develop the ability to understand the notion of a false belief. Recognition of self in a mirror image has received much attention as an experimental method of assessing self-awareness in animals. A human infant is at first unable to perceive itself as separate from its surrounding environment. Most of the psychological evidence indicates that human infants develop a concept of the self from around twelve to twenty-four months of age. The development of self-awareness may be dependent on the social environment in which an animal is raised, as well as on age and other individual characteristics. The apparent absence of ability in monkeys, as opposed to apes, to respond to their image as self may have been merely a result of not using an appropriate method for testing them.
