Introduction

All mammals exhibit some form of awareness: Attention, proprioception, the capacity for pain, as well as a sense of permanence, agency, and continuity constitute “the machinery of the self” (Lewis, SAAH2), which underlies simple awareness. At least some aspects of the machinery of the self are probably universal among animals because they are necessary for goal-directed behavior by any kind of entity (Fehling, personal communication). Selfawareness, in contrast, goes beyond the machinery of the self to the idea of me (Lewis, SAAH2). As the phrase “the idea of me” implies, self-awareness involves cognitive and affective components that exceed those necessary for simple awareness. In this paper we are concerned first with self-awareness and how it develops in human children. Second, we are concerned with the implications that developmental models of self-awareness may have for understanding self-awareness in our closest relatives, great apes, lesser apes, and Old World monkeys.

Drawing on William James's (1892/1961) famous distinction between the subjective and objective self, we understand subjective self-awareness in human adults to be an individual's awareness of his own bodily, emotional, mental, and social characteristics, his own goals, plans, and intentions, and of the strategies he might employ in the service of those goals.