Unique neural representations of the self
Presented During:
Wednesday, June 28, 2017: 11:20 AM - 11:32 AM
Vancouver Convention Centre
Room:
Room 220-222
Submission No:
4201
Submission Type:
Abstract Submission
On Display:
Wednesday, June 28 & Thursday, June 29
Authors:
Yina Ma1
Institutions:
1State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China
First Author:
Yina Ma
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Lecture Information
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State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University
Beijing, China
State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University
Beijing, China
Introduction:
Although distinguishing the self from others is a key aspect of social behavior, whether the representation of the self is unique has been debated for decades. Substantial behavioral evidence suggests that mental processes of the self are different from those of others, we respond faster to our own face than faces of others (Keenan et al., 1999; Ma et al., 2010), remember self-related items better (Klein et al., 1989) and enhance attention to and perceptual salience of self-related information (Brédart et al., 2006; Sui et al., 2012). The behavioral findings drive neuroimaging studies to search unique neural representations of the self, which, however, reported evidence for specific but also shared representations of the self and significant others (Heatherton et al., 2006; Zhu et al., 2007). Thus it remains unclear whether and how the self is represented in the human brain in a distinctive fashion. The present study used the form of multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) known as representational similarity analysis (RAS) to examine the unique neural representations of the self.
Methods:
Sixty-nine participants were scanned using fMRI during a self-referential task that required judgments of whether a given word described the self, mother or a gender-matched celebrity in terms of mental, physical and social attributes, thus resulting in 9 conditions (3 targets × 3 dimensions). We assessed the neural patterns corresponding to each condition, which was then employed to calculate the pairwise similarity/dissimilarity of neural representations of the 9 conditions by correlating their activity patterns. To capture inter-condition similarities between each pair of conditions at behavioral level, an independent sample of participants (n = 19) were recruited to complete a social-salience task. A whole-brain searchlight RSA on each participant's brain imaging data was employed to identify the regions in which the pairwise similarity of the neural patterns of the 9 conditions was predicted by condition similarity derived from the social-salience task using the Spearman rank correlation (Nili et al., 2014).
Results:
The dissimilarity values derived from behavioral data suggested the unique representation of the self in two-fold (Fig. 1A/B): (a) the representations of the self were dissimilar with those of mother and other, whereas the latter two were similar with each other (target-specificity); and (b) larger dissimilarities among the mental, physical and social dimensions of the self relative to those of others (dimension-specificity). The searchlight RSA revealed that behavioral models predicted the similarity of patterns of neural activity in the mPFC, PCC, and TPJ (Fig. 1C, voxel-wise P (FWE) < 0.05). These findings were further validated by separating analyses of target-specific and dimension-specific effects based on theoretical models. Specifically, the self-target model predicted the similarity of patterns of the mPFC and PCC activity, and the self-dimension model predicted the similarity of activity patterns in the mPFC, PCC, TPJ, middle temporal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, and dlPFC.
·Figure 1. Behavioral model and corresponding neural patterns.
Conclusions:
Our behavioral and neuroimaging findings provide evidence for the unique representations of the self, manifesting as a specific processing target as well as distributed representations across different dimensions.
Imaging Methods:
BOLD fMRI
Modeling and Analysis Methods:
Multivariate modeling 2
Social Neuroscience:
Self Processes 1
Social Cognition
Keywords:
Multivariate
Other - Self; Neural representation; medial prefrontal cortex; domain-specific;
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Ma, Y., Han, S. (2010). Why respond faster to the self than others? An implicit positive association theory of self advantage during implicit face recognition. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform, 36, 619‐633
Klein, S. B., Loftus, J., & Burton, H. A. (1989). Two self-reference effects: The importance of distinguishing between self-descriptiveness judgments and autobiographical retrieval in self-referent encoding. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56, 853–865.
B´redart, S., Delchambre, M., & Laureys, S. (2006). One’s own face is hard to ignore. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 59, 46–52.
Sui J, He X, Humphreys GW (2012). Perceptual effects of social salience: evidence from self-prioritization effects on perceptual matching. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 38(5):1105-17.
Heatherton TF, Wyland CL, Macrae CN, Demos KE, Denny BT, Kelley WM (2006). Medial prefrontal activity differentiates self from close others. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 1(1):18-25.
Zhu Y, Zhang L, Fan J, Han S (2007). Neural basis of cultural influence on self-representation. Neuroimage, 34(3):1310-6.
Nili H, Wingfield C, Walther A, Su L, Marslen-Wilson W, Kriegeskorte N (2014). A toolbox for representational similarity analysis. PLoS Comput Biol. 10(4):e1003553.