Contribution
It gave the question “where in the body is a person?” an indirect method that works with 4-year-olds: which of two equally distant objects is closer to someone. Before it, the evidence was adults’ direct answers, open to the objection that they repeat what they learned about the brain. After it, there is a result that preschoolers and adults, judging cartoon characters, treat objects near the eyes as closest to the person, and track the eyes when they are moved to the chest.
Key insight
Ask which fly is nearer to someone and people answer as if the person were at the eyes, not spread over the body and not at the head as a whole. The authors take this to show where people think the self is. What it shows directly is where people think someone else is.
Assumptions
- Closeness tracks the self. “If people have an intuition that the self is located in a particular part of the body, then they should judge that objects nearer to that part of the body are closest to the person” (p. 314). That the converse holds, that a closeness preference reveals an intuition about the self rather than about salience, attention or social engagement, is assumed.
- Person, self and soul are one target. The question asks about Mary; the conclusion is about “the self”; the title about “the soul”. The paper does not separate them.
- An indirect question escapes learned theory. “The indirect nature of our method, and the fact that these judgments are shared by adults and preschoolers, suggests that our results do not reflect a culturally learned understanding of the role of the brain” (p. 317). The children’s limited grasp of the brain is cited (Johnson & Wellman 1982 and others), not measured.
- Judgements about a cartoon generalise to persons. All stimuli are drawings: Mary, the alien Zafi, the profile Erika (Fig. 1).
Key results
- Experiment 1 (pp. 314–315). 50 children aged 4–5 (mean 4;8, 23 girls), from local preschools; 52 adults on Amazon Mechanical Turk (35 women, 18–64, mean 33), paid $0.50. A fly was superimposed on Mary at the eyes, mouth, chest, stomach or feet; all ten pairs once; “Which fly is closer to Mary?” Each position scored out of 4. Choices rose toward the eyes (Spearman rs = 1.0 for both groups). On the six head-against-lower-body trials, children chose the head 70% and adults 76% (binomial, both p < .0001). Within the head, adults chose eyes (M = 2.85) and mouth (2.69) equally (t(51) = .84, p = .40); children chose eyes (2.84) over mouth (2.42; t(49) = 2.04, p = .05). By most frequent choice, eyes led in both groups (adults 46% against mouth 37%, Fisher p = .43; children 60% against 40%, p = .07).
- Experiment 2 (pp. 315–316). 41 children (mean 4;11, 20 girls) and 51 adults (35 women, 20–70, mean 37); three children and four adults were excluded for not pointing to Zafi’s face on its chest and head on top. Zafi is Mary recoloured green with the face on the chest: Mary’s eyes and mouth positions become Zafi’s head, chest becomes eyes, stomach becomes mouth. Adults chose the chest-eyes position over every other (M = 3.45, all p < .0001), chose the position nearer the eyes 86% of the time (t(46) = 12.20, p < .0001), and chose lower head and mouth, equidistant from the eyes, equally (t(46) = .95, p = .35); 77% chose eyes most often. Children chose eyes (M = 2.68) over every position (all p < .03) except the upper head (2.41; t(40) = .95, p = .35); chose the position nearer the eyes 63% of the time (t(39) = 3.79, printed “p < .0001”; that t gives p ≈ .0005); and chose lower head over mouth (2.20 against 1.58, t(39) = 2.38, p = .02). Most frequent choice: eyes 49%, upper head 39% (Fisher p = .50). The authors read the children’s split as difficulty “to refrain from thinking of the eyes as being in the usual spot”. They name two alternatives: a fly at the eyes is irritating, or “Which fly is closer?” was read as “Which fly will this person see as closer?”
- Experiment 3 (pp. 316–317). 42 children (mean 4;11, 28 girls) and 53 adults (31 women, 19–67, mean 34). A snowflake beside Erika in profile, in front of the head (eyes), stomach and feet, and behind the head and the feet; head and eyes drawn smaller to be less salient. Choices rose toward the eyes (all rs > .9). Eyes chosen over every position (adults M = 3.23, all p < .001; children 2.70, all p < .02). Stomach and back of head were chosen equally (binomial, adults p = .20, children p = .14); back of head over front of feet (adults p = .05, children p = .01). Most frequent: eyes for 64% of adults and 55% of children; back of head 9% and 31%; stomach 9% and 29%. So participants “are not using what a person can see as a measure of what is close to her” (p. 317).
- Association check (footnote 1, p. 317). Separate Mechanical Turk samples asked which part of the character they associated most with the fly (N = 19) or the snowflake (N = 22) chose “randomly”, with the nose most common (N = 4 each).
- Conclusion (p. 317). “Together, these studies provide converging evidence that children and adults intuitively think of the self as occupying a physical location within the body, close to the eyes.” The results “might instead be rooted in a more intuitive or phenomenological sense of where in our bodies we reside”.
- Hiding (pp. 317–318). Following Neisser (1997), young children who say an adult “cannot see me” when their own eyes are covered may mean “cannot see my self”; “the eyes are the windows to the soul”.
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | Children and adults judge an object near a drawn person’s head closer to her than one near her lower body | strong for this task | Exp. 1, about 50 per group, 70–76% of head-against-body trials, p < .0001 |
| C2 | The preference follows the eyes, not the face or head as such | moderate for adults, weak for children | Exp. 2 adults 77% eyes, lower head = mouth; children split eyes 49% / upper head 39%; Exp. 1 adults eyes = mouth |
| C3 | The preference is not for what the person can see | moderate | Exp. 3: back of head over front of feet, p = .05 and .01; stomach = back of head |
| C4 | Children and adults think of the self as located at or near the eyes | weak | rests on C1–C3 plus the untested assumption that closeness to a person is closeness to her self |
| C5 | The intuition is not learned from ideas about the brain | weak | inference from the indirect method and the children’s age; children’s beliefs not measured |
| C6 | It rests on a phenomenological sense of where we reside | speculation | nothing first-person was measured |
| C7 | Children’s “you can’t see me” with eyes covered reflects locating the self at the eyes | speculation | reinterpretation of other studies |
Concepts
- Location of the self — as operationalised: the part of a drawn body such that objects near it are judged closest to the person.
- Projected self-location — Alsmith & Longo’s term (NOTE-1008) for this kind of judgement, made about a depicted figure rather than one’s own body.
Connections
It answers Bertossa et al. 2008 (adults, by interview, locate themselves behind the eyes, blind participants in the head too) and Limanowski & Hecht 2011 (head and chest on an outline) with a method meant to bypass learned theory. It is in the line of Bloom’s Descartes’ Baby, on intuitive dualism in children. Alsmith & Longo 2014 (LIT-1266), read alongside, calls its claim “provocative”, classes it as projected self-location, and, with people pointing at their own bodies, finds the torso as well as the face. The two results differ in person (third against first), in object (cartoon against own body), and in resolution (eyes against a face region that includes them).
Bearing on the record
- THEORY-766, THEORY-769, THEORY-767, THEORY-458. No bearing. Nothing is owned, stroked, synchronised or done; no one’s own body is involved.
- THEORY-768. Bearing only by analogy, and none on its promotion test. Blanke & Metzinger (NOTE-1002) place the geometrical origin of the weak first-person perspective, usually visuospatial, inside the volume of self-location. That ordinary judges place a person at her eyes fits that picture. But Experiment 3 shows the judgement is not about the person’s visual field, and it is a judgement about someone else. It says nothing about where anyone feels themselves to be, which is what the THEORY’s self-location dimension is.
- QUESTION-048: what a folk judgement can establish. It establishes how people attribute location to a pictured person under one question (“closer to”), and that 4-year-olds do it as adults do. That is a fact about the attribution. It does not establish where a self is, since no folk consensus fixes that, nor where people experience themselves to be, since no one reported on their own case. The authors’ last step, to a “phenomenological sense of where in our bodies we reside”, is the move from attribution to experience that QUESTION-048 asks evidence to earn. Alsmith & Longo’s first-person task, run on adults’ own bodies, gave a different answer, which is a reason not to read the third-person result as a report of experience.
- TERM-045 and ADR-024. The question is about a person (Mary), the conclusion about “the self”, the title about “the soul”. ADR-024 keeps self (being a subject) apart from person, and TERM-045 asks which sense of self a claim uses. The nearest is sense 1, the subject with a point of view, located; the paper does not say, and its evidence cannot choose.
- THEORY-417, NOTE-374, LIT-451. No bearing on the questions of personal identity: nothing here concerns persistence, what a person is, or Hume’s missing impression of a self. It is about where ordinary thought puts a person in her body, not about what she is or what makes her persist.
- No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing for the anthology.
Limitations
- The inference to the self is built in. No condition separates “closer to the self” from closer to what is socially salient in a face (gaze, attention, where one would look at someone). Experiment 3 removes “what she can see”, not “where one looks at her”.
- Experiment 1’s flies sit on the body. Each fly is superimposed on Mary, not beside her (Fig. 1), so every position touches her and “closer” must be read in some other way; how children read it is not known.
- Adults did not prefer eyes to mouth in Experiment 1, and children did not separate eyes from the upper head in Experiment 2. The eyes-not-head conclusion for children rests on Experiment 3.
- Small slips. t(39) = 3.79 is printed “p < .0001” (p ≈ .0005). In Experiment 2 the children’s tests have 40 and 39 degrees of freedom with 41 children, and the adults’ 46 with 51 adults, so the analysed numbers are not stated. The abstract’s “closet” is a typo for “closest”.
- Samples. Preschoolers from local schools and US Mechanical Turk adults paid $0.50; no other culture. The claim that this is not cultural rests on age, not on cross-cultural data.
- Pictures, not people. Every judgement concerns a cartoon.
Open questions
- Does the eye preference hold when the judge locates herself rather than a cartoon? Alsmith & Longo’s task suggests not wholly; a design asking both questions of the same participants would tell.
- Does it hold across cultures whose ideas of the self’s seat differ (the heart, the belly), which is the test the “not learned” claim needs?
- Is it about the self or about the face as the seat of attention? A character whose eyes are closed or covered, or one looking away, would separate them.