Theoretical and conceptual advances in the cognitive neuroscience of self representation:
Representations of the minimal self in self-narrative

Cognitive Science Lab, University of Central Florida

This is a research project funded by the National Science Foundation, and the European Science Foundation and conducted at the University of Central Florida. It involves interdisciplinary collaboration that puts American researchers and graduate students in touch with a larger collaborative project that includes a number of leading research groups and laboratories in Europe. The larger project brings together researchers from philosophy, psychology, cognitive neuroscience and psychiatry in an interdisciplinary examination of the phenomenology, psychology and neuroscience of self-representation.

Research conducted at the University of Central Florida is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0639037. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

People

Shaun Gallagher (PI) Department of Philosophy and the Cognitive Science Program (UCF)

Jeffrey S. Bedwell (co-PI) Clinical Psychology (UCF)

Stephen Fiore (co-PI) Cognitive Science Program and Institute of Simulation and Training (UCF)

Scott Sutterby (Ph.D. Candidate) Clinical Psychology (UCF). Spring 2007.

Michele Merritt (Ph.D Candidate) Philosophy; Linguistics M.A. (USF). Spring 2008 - Fall 2008

Micah Allen (Undergrad Honors Student) Psychology (USF) Fall 2007 - Spring 2008-Summer 2008

Leon de Bruin (Ph.D. Candidate) Philosophy, University of Leiden. Spring 2008-Fall 2008

Rebecca Jacobson (Ph.D. Candidate) Philosophy, University of Hertfordshire. Spring 2008-Fall 2008

 

This project is one part of a larger BASIC research project which is itself part of a larger complex of projects sponsored by the ESF under the title: Consciousness in Natural and Cultural Contexts (CNCC). BASIC stands for Brain, Agency, Self, Intersubjectivity and Consciousness and is a network of projects designed to examine the relations between phenomenologically relevant markers of self – e.g. senses of agency and ownership as part of the "minimal self" (see Gallagher 2000 for background) – and particular patterns of brain activity (e.g., the default mode (see Raichle et al. 2001). The aim is to further develop both empirical research and conceptual refinement, integrating into an interdisciplinary research field whose epistemological validity is supported by a solid anchoring in well-established research traditions.

BASIC Project Leader: Andreas Roepstorff, University of Aarhus, Denmark

BASIC Principal Investigators:
• Christopher Frith, University College London, UK
• Shaun Gallagher, University of Central Florida, Orlando, USA
• Anthony Jack, Washington University, St. Louis, USA
• Tatjana Nazir, Hôpital Lyon Université, France
• Marcus Raichle, Washington University, St. Louis, USA
• Dan Zahavi, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

BASIC Associated Partners:
• Vittorio Gallese, Università degli Studi di Parma, Italy
• Patrick Haggard, University College London, UK
• Evan Thompson, University of Toronto, Canada
• Kai Vogeley, University of Cologne, Germany

The larger research project unites a number of leading research groups and laboratories in Europe and in the US employing a range of methods from conceptual analysis and phenomenological investigations to fMRI, PET and TMS. This allows bringing already ongoing research into a larger framework and it allows establishing novel collaborative research projects directly aimed at examining aspects of self-relations. Planned activities range from phenomenological examinations, and conceptual and linguistic analysis to behavioral, cognitive and brain imaging experiments. Much of the work carries potential clinical implications in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases involving disturbances in self-relations, body image and action ascription (e.g., see Brain's 'Default Mode' Awry In Schizophrenia). To assure coherence within the network, there will be a yearly workshop for all research group members 2007: Subjectivity, Intersubjectivity and Self-representation (Aarhus), 2008: Default brain mode and Self-correlates (St. Louis), 2009: Agency and Self (Lyon). Further integration of projects will be assured by a scientist exchange program within the network, particularly aimed at PhD students and post docs.

Representations of the minimal self in self-narrative explores the connection between aspects of the "minimal self" (which includes senses of ownership and agency) and a fuller and more developed narrative self. Competency for self-narrative extends the experience of self, in a very plastic way, across time and variation in contexts. It forms the basis for developing a consistent self-concept. This competency, however, depends on the more basic sense of minimal self. Although the capacity for self-narrative is complicated by metacognition and autobiographical memory, it includes a basic connection to phenomenological structures of the minimal self, represented by use of the first-person pronoun (and other related constructions) in contexts that involve self-agency.

A number of philosophers have argued that use of the first-person pronoun has guaranteed self-reference (Strawson 1994), and, in certain circumstances, immunity from misidentification (Shoemaker 1984). As such it is an extremely stable anchor of a minimal sense of self-ownership in self-narrative (Gallagher 2003). It is nonetheless possible to find instances where the first-person pronoun becomes dissociated from the predicates of self-agency. These include cases of schizophrenic symptoms of delusions of control and thought insertion (Frith 1992; Gallagher 2004). Although our group is primarily interested in studying the role of the minimal self in the normal construction of a narrative self, our investigation will also focus on variations from normal.

This part of the BASIC project proposes to study the precise involvement of first-person markers of the minimal self and the sense of agency in self-narrative by contrasting non-pathological and schizophrenic narratives.  As such, it depends on and contributes to the theoretical background defined in the BASIC research program. It aims for conceptual refinement of the notions of minimal self and narrative self, and their interrelationship. The specific aims of this investigation are (1) to study both normal and pathological self-narratives, (2) to compare structural differences in narratives with special attention to textual markers of action ownership (specifically in the use of the first person pronoun) and agency, and (3) in collaboration with the BASIC research groups (Roepstorff-Frith, Zahavi) in Europe, to correlate these differences with neurological processes.

Theoretical background

Gallagher (2000) argued that recent developments in philosophical approaches to the self may enhance the exchange of ideas between the philosophy of the mind and the other cognitive sciences. These included a conceptual clarification of the notions of a “minimal self,” including a sense of agency, and a sense of ownership, and a narrative self. articularly the concepts of agency and ownership have proven eminently productive, in terms of path-breaking empirical research (Ehrsson, Spence, and Passingham 2004, Farrer and Frith 2002, Frith 2005, Tsakiris and Haggard 2005), and novel conceptual developments (de Vignemont and Fourneret 2004, Legrand 2003, Proust 2003). One of the reasons for this rapid development involves significant improvements in scanning technologies and data modeling and processing that have allowed for highly sophisticated empirical examinations. However, equally important are conceptual changes in the understanding of experiments, particularly in terms of paying detailed attention to experiential qualities (Frith 2002, Jack and Roepstorff 2002) and of ‘front-loading’ phenomenology into experimental designs (Gallagher 2003, Lutz and Thompson 2003). Recent scientific investigations of the relation between self, consciousness, and the brain have thereby amply demonstrated the feasibility of an interdisciplinary approach.

Minimal self.  The notions of minimal self and narrative self, have hitherto not received the same interdisciplinary attention, although from a phenomenological and conceptual perspective they appear at least as fundamental as notions of agency and ownership. It has been difficult to translate these notions into concrete investigations and difficult to identify particular signatures at the level of brain dynamics that could usefully relate to the general notions. However, during recent years, it has become apparent that patterns of activations seen during typical task-related brain imaging experiments often appear against a background of a down-regulation, as measured by various physiological parameters, in a network of brain regions, particularly along the medial axis of the brain, and in the posterior parietal cortex. Activity in this network, which may be found across a number of experimental conditions (Fransson 2005), has become known as the ‘default mode’ of the brain (Raichle et al. 2001). It was early suggested that self-referential mental activity may be related to the anterior part of this network (Gusnard et al. 2001), and several pieces of independent evidence have correlated activity also in the posterior part of this network with a first-person perspective or an egocentric stance both in combined script- and stimulus driven activation studies (Lou et al. 2004, Vogeley et al. 2004) as well as in meditation studies (Lou and Kjaer 2005). Activity in the default brain network is therefore one possible candidate for a neuronal signature of self-consciousness (Newen and Vogeley 2003), particularly with reference to a minimal self, i.e. ‘a consciousness of oneself, as an immediate subject of experience...[depending on] brain processes and an ecologically embedded body’ (Gallagher 2000). As activity in the network appears related to outward activity and to task difficulty, there are obvious putative links between the default mode network, and the signatures for self-agency-ownership relations developed in the approaches discussed above. However, the interpretation of these results is complicated by the fact that in many of these experiments, it is difficult to tease apart task difficulty and putative self-reference. There is therefore a strong need to extend the solid, interdisciplinary approach developed for agency-ownership-self relations into a thorough examination of this novel field.

Narrative self.  From a conceptual, a phenomenological and an empirical point of view, the relations between a minimal or core self and an extended, narrative or autobiographical self remain controversial. They may be seen to be complementary notions. But is the core self a (logical and temporal) precondition for the extended (narrative or autobiographical) self? Or is the core self, on the contrary, a subsequent abstraction; is it simply a stripped-down version of what must count as the genuine and original self (Zahavi 2005)? An examination of the narrative or extended self across a number of fields of inquiry is, therefore, important both in its own right and in establishing an understanding of basic requirements of selfhood.

Intersubjective relations.   Both from the perspective of philosophy of mind and of phenomenology, a strong link between the constituents of self and intersubjective self-other relations has long been claimed (Thompson 2001). This line of research has only recently received attention within cognitive science, partly due to a certain behaviouristic heritage (Roepstorff 2003). However, there is increasing evidence, also from the empirical literature, of strong links between self and relations with others, in experiments framed in terms of theory-of-mind (Vogeley et al. 2001), agency and intentionality (Wohlschlager, Engbert, and Haggard 2003) and shared understanding (Gallese 2003). It has been hypothesized that this may, in neuronal terms, generalise onto a medial prefrontal self-other anchoring (Roepstorff and Frith 2004). However, the links between this line of research and the more well established field of inquiry outlined above have not been thoroughly investigated. There is therefore much need of extending the interdisciplinary research approach into this field also.

Clinical extensions.  A number of clinical diagnoses, particularly schizophrenia and autism, are characterized by apparent disturbances in the experience of agency, stability of minimal self and inter-subjective relations (Kircher and David 2003, Sass and Parnas 2003). It is therefore of considerable importance to examine whether the general findings of this research project have explanatory value in an understandings of these disorders. Research on clinical populations will be carried out in collaboration with the Roepstorff and Zahavi groups (schizophrenia), the Vogeley group (autism) and the Nazir group (brain lesions). A long-term objective is to examine whether neuronal signatures of the self, identified within this project, are applicable also for diagnostic purposes.

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