Unique neural representations of the self

Vancouver Convention Centre 

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.