Date: Wednesday, 11.01.2023 15:20 CET
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Abstract:
What does it mean, to have a ‘self’ – something that defines us, and that differentiates us from our environment and from others? People differ in many aspects of their physical and psychological attributes, and expression of this individual uniqueness is ubiquitous in many (Western) cultures. However, having a core self-representation goes beyond contrasting conscious and clearly defined self-images, but constitutes a deeply conserved feature that is expressed across species, and is fundamental for integrating sensory inputs into a coherent and stable representation of the environment around us. For hundreds of years, the nature and function of the multi-dimensional construct of a ‘self’ have been predominantly discussed in the domain of philosophy. While social psychologists started investigating the role of the self in social contexts in the 19th century, cognitive approaches to understanding the self in basic information processing are relatively young. Within the domain of social cognition, we apply experimental methods to address questions about social phenomena. This approach allows us, for example, to operationalize the self through prioritization effects on perceptual and cognitive processing (i.e., self-relevant information is processed faster and more efficiently). Similarly, within the field of cognitive neuroscience, we can utilize social constructs such as the self to learn more about the malleability of perceptual-cognitive processes to high-level conceptual representations. In this talk, I will introduce a series of studies that make use of this transdisciplinary approach to understanding the self, as well as its effects on hierarchical information processing. Our results show that attaching mere self-relevance to environmental information alters early attentional selection, multisensory integration, and decision-making. Furthermore, our studies suggest that effects of self-relevance towards different types of information originate from an individual’s same, underlying self-representation, providing a stable processing basis that can flexibly incorporate novel information. As such, these studies shed light onto how our individual experiences are affected by our self-representation across multiple levels of information processing. Furthermore, they serve as an example of transdisciplinary research: combining different perspectives and approaches to transcend the traditionally conceived boundaries between disciplines in order to provide a more holistic approach to understanding our mind and behaviour.
