Lecture 8 - The Self PDF

Lecture 8 - The Self What makes a self? Physical attributes -“I” How you look How you feel Where you experience yourself to be What you can do Mental attributes - “Me” Autobiographical memories personality traits cognitive/ emoti...

Lecture 8 - The Self What makes a self? Physical attributes -“I” How you look How you feel Where you experience yourself to be What you can do Mental attributes - “Me” Autobiographical memories personality traits cognitive/ emotional skills and abilities self-knowledge values/ tastes/ biases Social Attributes Could we develop the same selves in isolation/ different social contexts? We affect, and are affected by, the world Self-enlargement or reduction through others Psychological Models of the Self Models of the self distinguish between physical (embodied) and mental (abstract/ narrative/ psychological) self-awareness Phsycial/ embodied Feeling of one’s self as the physical subject of one’s experiences Mental/ narrative Feeling of one’s self as the observer of one’s experiences The Self as an Illusory Construction The brain constructs a coherent, unified feeling of ‘self’ A ‘me’ as a person with memories, traits, values etc that acts at any one moment as an ‘i’, a bodily agent in the world This feeling extends in time, held together through ‘memory’ Even though every cell in our body changes and our memory tends to be biased in favour of  consistency with our current self This feeling is surprisingly stable Even though the integration of multiple components happens continuously on a moment by moment basis, with many opportunities for mistakes Representations of the self There is not one, but several different levels of self-representation The ‘minimal’ self Foundation of the physical sense of self Embodied sensation of being an ‘I’ who is the ‘immediate subject of experience, unextended in time i.e. sense of ‘being a self in a body’ that perceives, feels and acts Location of Self Limanowski & Hecht (2011)  Starmans & Bloom (2012) Location of self and first-person perspective The self occupies a physical location within the body, close to the eyes/ centre of head also in blind participants Intimately tied to how we view ourselves and the world: from within our bodies; from an egocentric perspective Egocentric perspective (self located within the body) breaks down in certain conditions / pathologies… Out of body experiences – e.g. in near-death experience, vestibular disorder, temporal lobe conditions (e.g. epilepsy), migraine, stroke, drug use, mental health conditions (depression, anxiety, depersonalisation) OBE = Experience of seeing one's body in a position that does not coincide with its felt position OBE is a dissociative experience - helps us understand the different fragments / components that make up the self Here, different visual-spatial representations of the bodily self In OBEs, your felt self-location changes In Autoscopy, it does not change In both, you perceive you rbody in extrapersonal space Blanke et al. (2004): OBE / Autoscopy are due to 2 types of faulty integration between multisensory signals: 1. Integration within personal space: proprioceptive, tactile, vestibular and body-related-visual information in various brain areas 2. Integration between personal space and extrapersonal space at the temporoparietal junction Vestibular system provides absolute gravitational reference for the integration of other bodily signals and the control of body position in space This helps us to have an embodied ego-centric perspective on the world by ‘anchoring the self to the body’ - studies of vestibular stimulation show this Vestibular system, stimulated through passive motion, acoustic or galvanic stimulation Useful for studying egocentric self-awareness Disintegration between personal space and extrapersonal space can result form sudden dysfunction of the right temporoparietal junction (TPJ) in a breif state of partially impaired consciousness May be due to cortical hyperexcitability OBEs can be induced experimentally by stimulation of the right TPJ this very likely disrupts multisensory spatial integration there TPJ stimulation also induces vestibular sensations TPJ implicated in visuospatial perpective-taking, control of imitation, theory of mind Functions require an intentional change in viewpoint Multisensory illusions are another way to induce OBEs experimentally Full body illusion After synchronous multisensory stimulation participants feel to be located behind their own body, and have corresponding autonomic responses Guterstam et al. (2015): Full body illusion with changes in felt location Sense of self-location reflected in activity patterns in hippocampus, parts of posteromedial cortex (PMC) (posterior cingulate & retrosplenial cortices) and intraparietal cortices PS. PMC activity coupled to DMN during rest but not during task PMC also contains the precuneus  Precuneus connected to intraparietal regions and right TPJ Intracranial electrical stimulation of the anterior precuneus causes dissociative changes in spatial self (specifically, floating sensations) This region provides “the self’s physical point of reference, given its location within a spatial environment” (Lyu et al., 2023) Self-location and self-identification Manipulations of multisensory input affect feelings of self-location as well as body ownership/ self-identification Guterstam et al. (2015): Sense of illusory body ownership reflected in activity in premotor and intraparietal cortices The posterior cingulate cortex (part of PMC) mediates functional interplay between these two sets of areas à integration of self-location and body ownership for unified perceptual representation of the bodily self in space Dary et al. (2023): Review of 42 studies of 221 patients revealed 6 main areas underlying bodily self Parietal cortex particularly important as found implicated in all 5 aspects of bodily self (self location, body ownership, first-person perspective, agency, perceptual body image) Blanke et al. (2015): Continuous feelings of self-location, body ownership, and self-identification require continuous multisensory stimulation within certain spatio-temporal and visual constraints Other ways of testing self-identification Faces = emblems of the self The ability to recognise one’s own face in the mirror is considered a hallmark of self-awareness in development and cross-species research ‘Enfacement illusion’ shows this to be malleable too and suggests that self-identification depends on continuous multisensory stimulation Tsakiris (2008): Enfacement illusion – greater identification with stranger’s face following synchronous visual-tactile stimulation  “Self-face advantage” (reviewed by Bortolon & Raffard, 2018) Faster (and sometimes more accurate) responses to self-face than to other faces Robust effect as it occurs in all sorts of conditions Depends on (eastern vs. western) culture of participants (self-construal…) Self-face is more strongly represented than any other face Self-face Advantage  Faster (and more accurate) at identifying face as friend than as stranger - familiar face advantage Even faster (and more accurate) at identifying self - self-face advantage Bortolon & Raffard (2018): The self-face advantage arises because the self is a unique stimulus… Over-familiarisation with one’s own face Unique experiences with one’s own face Highly predictable multisensory stimulation Attribution of positive characteristics to the self … and thus benefits from a stronger mental representation Less affected by stimulus inversion Better preserved in acquired prosopagnosia / late-stage cognitive decline SFA in the Brain Morita et al. (2008): increased activity for self-face vs. familiar other face in bilateral occipital cortices (OFA) extending to inferior temporal and fusiform regions (FFA) Similar findings made by Kaplan et al. (2008) and Uddin et al. (2005) All of these studies are summarised in Hu et al.’s (2016) meta-analysis  Self-body recognition in OFA-equivalent body-selective area EBA (e.g. Myers & Sowden, 2008; Saxe et al., 2006; Vocks et al., 2010) Self-face processing is supported by OFA/FFA, but also Premotor-parietal regions (IFG/insula and angular gyrus) (body ownership regions) ACC (core self region) Representations of the Self The Mental/ Narrative Self  Extended self (past, present, future) is part of the mental / narrative / abstract / psychological / cognitive self The self as the observer of one’s own experiences: Stable experience of one’s self as continuous through time Autobiographical memory Self-knowledge (skills / values / biases) Self-referential processing (thinking about traits and preferences) Unlike the physical self, the narrative self is NOT represented in sensory-motor coordinates (premotor-parietal regions) but in amodal / verbal / linguistic regions of the brain… Self-referential processing Most studies of mental / narrative self have employed self-reference / cognitive appraisal tasks E.g. Deciding if a given personality trait (e.g. “brave”) accurately describes yourself vs. deciding if a given personality trait accurately describes another person To do this, one needs to retrieve and assemble memories (an autobiographical-self state) and decide based on the accessed knowledge Self-reference can also be tested via an abstract version of the self-face advantage paradigm Self-referential processing of this type activates the Default mode network (DMN) / cortical midline regions (mPFC/ACC – the “core self” region - and parietal regions: pIPL and precuneus) DMN activity is the consistent predominant activity when participants in scanners “do nothing” Doing nothing = daydreaming, mind-wandering, thinking about self or others in the past and envisaging self or others in the future (ie., mentalising) DMN also activated in tasks of social working memory, autobiographical episodic memory… DMN is deactivated through engagement in a task / attention to a task This balancing is disrupted in major depressive disorder, which is marked by excessive self- biased attention (rumination) and negative evaluation of the self Depressed patients show excessive mPFC activity and decreased dlPFC activity in self- referential tasks (Northoff, 2007) SFA extends to objects Self-advantage not just for faces but extends to other things that are “mine” (see Sui & Gu,  2019) – faster and more accurate responses to self-associated shapes than other-associated shapes Perceptual processing & integration of information tagged as “self” is prioritised by default Enhanced connectivity between mPFC and pSTS underlies this effect ** Core self = medial PFC (part of DMN), ACC **  mPFC (of the DMN) is one of the regions underlying the “core self” pSTS is an attentional control region Enhanced connectivity = prioritisation of self Other-referential Processing Information tagged as “other” instead activates fronto-parietal attentional control network / enhanced dlPFC This signifies the need to suppress self-related processing in situations where self is irrelevant & others are relevant Brain networks underlying the self Physical and mental self-representations are sustained by distinct yet interacting large-scale brain networks* supporting… …shared representations mirror neuron system and default mode network …emotional/attentional processing salience network and cognitive control network and spatial reference  Posteromedial cortical regions, TPJ and hippocampus Mirror Neuron System: Lateral premotor-parietal network (+ extended perceptual regions) for embodied simulation (shared representations) MNS lets us predict our own sensations / actions / emotions as well as those of others (“mirroring”) – lower level / embodied / automatic Default Mode Network: Midline structures for mentalising / reflection (shared representations) DMN allows us to mentalise / take perspective / understand our own and others’ intentions – higher level / reflective “Hubs”: hypothetical links between MNS and DMN (shared but perhaps more self-specific) “Hubs” allow us to anchor experiences to our body; interactions with MNS and DMN give rise to extended self Meta-analysis of the self in the brain Meta-analysis shows IFG (MNS) / insula (salience) and ACC (core self region) are implicated in all self processing (self-face and self-referential > other-face and other-referential processing) Meta-analysis shows overlaps of 3 types of self-processing in insula Interoceptive, exteroceptive, mental self-processing Interactions Between Self-Representations Salomon (2017): interactions between physical and more complex self representations are still poorly understood DMN activity gives rise to feelings of “self-continuity” (extended self) (Northoff, 2017: “Rest- self containment”) … but this may be grounded in physical self processing? MNS and DMN interactions at “hubs” (AI / PCC) give rise to what we consciously experience as the extended self (Molnar-Szakacs & Uddin, 2013; Sandrone, 2013) There, embodied representations “scaffold” mentalising-based representations  This enables conscious reflection on our bodily states And allows the brain to construct a dynamic self that is continuous through time (the narrative self) Insula as facilitator for all self-representations Meta-analysis shows overlaps of 3 types of self-processing in insula Interoceptive, exteroceptive, mental self-processing Gradient organisation in self-processing: Propagation from Interoceptive-processing to Mental-self- processing allows body-environment information to be integrated for the self Development of a social sense of self Perner’s (1991) 3-stage model for mental representations: primary, secondary and meta- representations: Primary representations (immediate “I”; minimal self) From 2nd year of life, secondary representations develop; these are not permanent until 3rd-4th year (extended “me”; narrative self) Self-face recognition, memory skills From 3rd-4th year, meta-representations develop (representing as a representation), allowing mentalising / theory of mind (measured through false belief tasks) and the development of a social self Understanding that others have minds and mental contents that may differ from one’s own; acting accordingly Sense of bodily self emerges in early childhood, driven by one’s own bodily experiences (e.g. Rochat & Striano, 2000; Zmyj et al., 2011) Filippetti et al. (2013, 2014, 2015): Babies (and their brains) are sensitive to multisensory-motor contingencies from birth… Interactions with others play additional, critical role in providing such contingencies (e.g. Gallese & Sinigaglia, 2010; Legrand, 2006) Early imitative (“mirroring”) experiences provided by others are critical as they enable motoric &  emotional attunement between infants and caregivers (Gallese & Sinigaglia, 2010) Ideally, others consistently provide appropriate responses to infant (e)motions …this is not necessarily a mirroring response; could be complementary The Social Self Being capable of affecting others and being affected by others is basis of all social engagement (Fuchs & Koch, 2014; Gallese & Sinigaglia, 2010; Merleau-Ponty, 1962) … and of our broader development as humans Think of perspective-taking, empathising Children of emotionally neglectful mothers (vs. non-neglectful) show reduced emotional understanding (Edwards et al., 2005) Mothers provide less emotional support and less emotional discussion, and report more negative emotionality Neglected children are at an increased risk for psychosocial difficulties later in life (Rogosch et al., 1995) Enfacement illusion leads not only to greater identification with strangers, but also changes social cognition: Increases affiliation / closeness and conformity (Paladino et al., 2010)  Reduces outgroup bias (e.g., Maister et al., 2015) ** Salomon (2017): There is a close relationship between how we determine who we are and how we determine how to deal with others ** The social self = expansion of individual self Self is a unique stimulus because it is based on highly predictable multisensory stimulation Synchronised activities with others can be exhilarating because they are hugely self-affirmative (highly predictable but with amplified multisensory feedback) The self in humans vs. non-human animals Self-recognition in the mirror (but not in video) is within the capacity of all great apes Sporadic studies but not enough evidence for other species Apes and monkeys have similar capacity for secondary representations (Perner, 1991; see Carole, 2018) but monkeys need more contingent multisensory-motor experience with mirrors to pass the mark test (maybe less motivated) Chang et al. (2015): Rhesus macaque visual-tactile(irritant) training with laser à then passing mark test Also show spontaneous self-directed behaviours indicative of bodily self-consciousness (touch + smelling fingers; exploring unseen body parts) Rudimentary evidence for theory of mind in great apes (Suddendorf & Whiten, 2001) Krupenye et al. (2016): Summary Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) Medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) Dorsolateral PFC (dlPFC) Inferior frontal gyrus (IFG)  Insula Amygdala Striatum Hippocampus Occipital and fusiform face/body areas Temporoparietal junction (TPJ: STS & IPL) Precuneus in SPL Posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) Spatial self-processing regions (TPJ, hippocampus, posteromedial cortex) Mirror neuron system (premotor-parietal regions) / multisensory-motor processing Default mode network (midline cortical regions) / abstract reflection Salience (emotion/reward) network (medial-temporal regions) Cortical control (attention) network (prefrontal-parietal regions) #PS495