This paper focuses on the development of explicit self-awareness in children. Mirror selfrecognition has been the most popular paradigm used to assess this ability in children.Nevertheless, according to Rochat (2003), there are, at least, three different levels of explicit selfawareness. We therefore designed three different self-recognition tasks, each corresponding to one of these levels (a mirror self-recognition task, a picture self-recognition task and a masked self-recognition task). We observed a decrease in performance across the three tasks. This supports a developmental scale in self-awareness. Besides, the masked self-recognition performance makes it possible to assess the final and the most sophisticated level of selfawareness, i.e. the external self. To our best knowledge, this task is the first attempt to evaluate the external self in preverbal children. Our results indicate that 22-month old children show awareness of their external self or, at least, that this ability is in the process of being acquired.

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Female coalitions are an important part of the social organization of bonobos. The strength of the mother-son relationship is another essential part of this social structure. A bonobo mother is therefore facing a dilemma when a conflict arises between her sons and her female coalition partners. Will she take her coalition partner’s side and favour the social organization of the group or support her son in order to defend her offspring? In order to address this issue, we performed an observational study of the captive group at Planckendael (Belgium) and used social grooming and proximity to assess the relationship between individuals. As a case study, we focused on the relationships between Hortense, one of the group’s mothers, her 3 sons Redi, Vifijo and Zamba, and her coalition partner Hermien. Surprisingly, we observed that Hortense preferentially supported her female coalition partner. For Hortense’s social status in the group, it may be more important to maintain the strong relationship with her higher-ranking female coalition partner than to support her sons.

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