Definition
Knowing what one’s own appearance looks like
The Importance of Visual Self-Recognition
Although many of us experience seeing our own image on a daily basis (e.g., brushing our teeth using a mirror, catching our reflection in a window), we perhaps take our ability to know what we look like for granted. This seemingly mundane ability has nonetheless evoked substantial scientific, philosophical, and ethical interest. For example, self-recognition matters because it may be a proxy for complex psychological phenomena such as self-conception (i.e., a sense of identity persisting across time and space), self-awareness (i.e., making one’s self the object of attention), and/or secondary representation (i.e., generating and comparing multiple mental models) (see section “Psychological Mechanisms”). In turn, assuming that self-recognition indicates some form of psychological complexity has led to it being used as...
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Butler, D.L., Anderson, J.R. (2018). Visual Self-Recognition. In: Vonk, J., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_742-1
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