'Stream of consciousness' and 'ownership of thought' in indigenous people in central Australia.
The Journal of analytical psychology October 1, 2000 L Petchkovsky
In a culturally adapted version of Flavell's 'stream of consciousness' experiment, 15 Central Australian Aboriginal adults (8 patients, 7 colleagues) were shown pictures of persons with empty or 'busy' thought-bubbles and asked to assign a picture to the mental state of a second experimenter seen reading or sitting quietly. Only 4 people assigned the empty thought bubble to the quiet experimenter, a result at least as good as a sample of Stanford College students tested by Flavell. Participants' comments revealed great subtlety of phenomenological awareness, attributing subjectivity to non-human entities including inanimate elements.