You Can Only Self-Represent One Identity at a Time

Abstract

A cornerstone of cognitive science is that mental systems are limited: There is a maximum amount of information they can process or store, beyond which performance breaks down. Yet so far the study of such limits has been focused on core systems like attention and memory. Here we explore self-representation, the ability to represent someone or something as being you. We find a limit on a well-known index of self-representation known as the self-reference effect, whereby people perform better for items that they associate with themselves than with others. This effect does not scale additively when people actively associate stimuli with more than one self-concept at a time (e.g., their younger and older selves, or two hypothetical versions of themselves). This suggests that even though we can self-represent various self-concepts independently, we can never do so for more than one self-concept simultaneously.

Potential Traits and Personal Identity

“…Finally, we excluded individual trials with reaction times faster than 100ms (people jumping the gun, or holding down a key). These stringent exclusions led to a final sample of 24 participants (mean age = 31.2 years; 49% female), which is consistent with previous exclusions using the same criteria for this paradigm on Mechanical Turk (De Freitas et al, 2019).…”

“…Adding to Experiments 1-3, these results suggest that participants preferentially identified with the fetus at both explicit and implicit levels, as evidenced by the self-reference effect. Since selfreference effects are thought to be supported by a limited neural mechanism that can only represent one self at a time (De Freitas et al, 2019;Sui et al, 2013), the current results suggest that this same mechanism was used to represent the fetus as the self. Further, given that participants had to first understand the meaning of the vignette before these associations could be made, these results also suggest fresh information processed at an explicit level can drive self-referential behavior at an implicit level, in a top-down fashion.…”

“…So long as a participant performs better for one imagined self vs. another, we may conclude that the performance benefit occurred because one of the items was preferentially represented as the self. Also relevant, when multiple imagined selves are pitted against each other within the same paradigm, then people only exhibit a self-reference effect for one of imagined selves at a time, suggesting that there is a limit on how many imagined selves can be cognitively represented as the self concurrently (De Freitas et al, 2019).…”