Abstract: Face is a unique self-referential stimulus, presumably one’s most distinctive physical feature. A lot of human self-face recognition researches have been done on phylogeny, development, processing advantage and social situation adaptation. According to the surmise of evolutionary psychologists, self-cognition is a set of cognitive processing abilities developed from different evolutionary courses. There are five forms of self, ecological self-knowledge, interpersonal self-knowledge, extended self-knowledge, private self-knowledge and conceptual self-knowledge. They have different evolution and development process. Among them, self-face recognition is an important component. Its development rely on the processing of the extended self-knowledge. We can find its early form in the common ancestors of human beings and chimpanzees and bonobos lived in 6.5 to 4.5 Ma. In the coming evolutionary process, private self-knowledge and conceptual self-knowledge appeared in succession. The whole process recapitulate itself in the mankind's individual development. With the combination of extended self-knowledge, private self-knowledge and conceptual self-knowledge, human beings developed complicated and diversified behavior. It may well be this capacity that distinguishes humans, setting them apart from other animals. At present, though it's just the beginning for studies of neuro-mechanism of self-cognition and self-consciousness, more and more attentions from different researchers were focused in this field. Using self-face as object of study, a lot of works have done on the neurological basis of self-face cognitive processing, allocation of attention, development characteristics, relationship between theory of mind (ToM) with self concept, inhibition mechanism and its relationship with social adaption. Self-face, as the most significant mark for human individual, can be used as unique stimulus in the processing of extended self-knowledge, private self-knowledge and conceptual self-knowledge and also play important role in the exploration of the mechanism of self-processing. Evolution is a very long process and it is also prone to biology. Thus, the theory of evolutionary psychology is an appropriate frame for self cognition processing research, which suggests that the human beings are still in the progress of adaption to the social environment. As the environmental pressure for humans to survival is very little while the human relationships have become more and more complicated, future researches may focus on self awareness and self recognition processing in contemporary social situations, especially in different environment and relationships, which may indicate more and more evidence for the adaptive performance on human behavior.

Key words: self awareness, self cognition, self-face recognition, evolutionary psychology

摘要： 进化心理学家推测，自我认知是一组沿着不同进化历程发展起来的认知加工能力。史前人类的早期，自我面孔识别依赖于延展我的加工。由于我们对自我认知、自我意识的神经机制还知之不多，而它们对于理解人类行为复杂性又极其重要。自我面孔作为个体最显著的自我标识，可以作为延展我、私密我、概念我加工的独特刺激，对于揭示自我认知加工的机制具有重要作用。

关键词: 自我意识, 自我认知, 自我面孔识别, 进化心理学