How does the developing mind construct a self?

Our capacity to think about ourselves is a developmental achievement that, when it emerges, profoundly changes cognition. Currently, there are few, if any mechanistic accounts of where a concept of self could come from, and empirical investigation within contemporary developmental science is surprisingly absent. Drawing on a wealth of data from cognitive neuroscience and developmental psychology, I propose a new mechanistic account of the ontogeny of our reflective self-awareness anchored in infants' interoceptive signals. This is a social cognitive account in which infants' expectations about others' attention are deeply entwined with the modulating effect that others' attention has on infants' awareness of their interoceptive state, together providing the impetus for infants to generate a conceptual representation of self de novo. This article is part of the discussion meeting issue 'From being to identity: analysis and synthesis of the self'.