Neural Representation of The Self

Abstract

Knowledge about one’s personality, the self-concept, shapes human experience. Social cognitive neuroscience has made strides addressing the question of where and how the self is represented in the brain. The answer, however, remains elusive. We conducted two functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments (with the second being preregistered) employing a self-reference task with a broad range of attributes and carrying out a searchlight representational similarity analysis. The importance of attributes to self-identity was represented in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), whereas mPFC activation was unrelated both to self-descriptiveness of attributes (Experiments 1-2) and importance of attributes to a friend’s self-identity (Experiment 2). Our research provides a comprehensive answer to the abovementioned question: The self-concept is conceptualized in terms of self-importance and represented in the mPFC.