Mapping the pre-reflective experience of “self” to the brain – an fMRI study

782 

Abstract Submission 

Maria Chiara Piani^1,2, Thomas Koenig², Martin Jandl², Julie Nordgaard³, Yosuke Morishima²

¹Graduate School of Health Sciences, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland, ²Translational Research Center, University Hospital of Psychiatry, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland, ³Department of Clinical Medicine, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

Maria Chiara Piani  
Graduate School of Health Sciences, University of Bern|Translational Research Center, University Hospital of Psychiatry, University of Bern
Bern, Switzerland|Bern, Switzerland

Thomas Koenig  
Translational Research Center, University Hospital of Psychiatry, University of Bern
Bern, Switzerland

Martin Jandl  
Translational Research Center, University Hospital of Psychiatry, University of Bern
Bern, Switzerland

Julie Nordgaard  
Department of Clinical Medicine, University of Copenhagen
Copenhagen, Denmark

Yosuke Morishima  
Translational Research Center, University Hospital of Psychiatry, University of Bern
Bern, Switzerland

Selfhood is fundamental in human consciousness and has been divided into two main components: pre-reflective and reflective. Disorders at the pre-reflective level have been empirically demonstrated to constitute a psychopathological feature of schizophrenia spectrum disorders (Henriksen, 2021). Imaging studies have focused on reflective processes and point to the involvement of cortical midline structures (CMS) and default mode network (DMN). Additionally, some of the structures involved in reflective self-experience may also play a role in pre-reflective, particularly the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) (Northoff, 2006).
With our study, we further investigated the neural correlates of the pre-reflective and reflective self-experience with a lexical task in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a sample of healthy adult volunteers.

The experimental protocol consisted of a trait-judgment task and a control task modified from Esslen et al. (2008). In the main task, participants expressed yes/no judgments on three-word phrases referring to themselves or someone they knew well. In the control task, used to assess a task specificity of results, participants made a yes/no decision about the color concordance between the words. In both tasks, a jitter was applied between pronouns and adjectives to separate activity associated with the pre-reflective component from the reflective component, and additional pronouns alone were randomly interspersed and displayed for 0.5 sec. The total duration of each task was 15 min. In the experiment, the pre-reflective component was hypothesized to occur at the level of pronouns, primarily first-person, while the reflective at the level of adjectives.
The study sample included 32 healthy adult individuals (21F, 11M; mean age 24.4 ± 4.0 years).
The structural and functional image acquisition was performed with a 7T MAGNETOM Terra Siemens scanner equipped with a 64-channel head coil. The MRI data were processed with SPM12 (Friston, 2003) and CAT12 (Gaser, 2016).
In the first-level analyses, task conditions (self-pronoun, other-pronoun, self-adjective, other-adjective) were modeled. The subsequent group-level, random-effect analysis considered pronouns and adjectives, including self vs. other and other vs. self conditions, separately for the two tasks.

In the trait-judgment task, at the level of pronouns, the analysis did not yield any significant difference between self and other-references. At the level of adjectives, we found a significantly higher activation in self- than in other-reference in the left frontpolar cortex (coordinates x, y, z: -26 60 20) and paracingulate cortex (-2 48 2), and in the right pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA) (4 20 60) (p<0.001, cluster family-wise error (cFWE) corrected). In contrast, we did not observe any significant difference in any of the conditions in the control task.

We can conclude that the fMRI modality is best suited to investigate self-reflective processes. Overall, the regions involved in self-reference in adjectives overlapped with brain areas involved in self-referential mentation (Northoff, 2006). Additionally, the control task has proven the specificity of our findings.

Self Processes ¹

Activation (eg. BOLD task-fMRI)

BOLD fMRI ²

ADULTS

Cognition

Experimental Design

FUNCTIONAL MRI

MRI

Other - Self