Thinking about the Self from a Social Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective

In this paper Kashima et al. develop an interesting model of self that attempts to simulate several psychological processes critical to an amalgamated James-Mead theoretical conceptualization of self. More specifically, the authors use a connectionist framework to model temporal, cultural and social aspects of self which may give rise to the enculturated stream of consciousness which is seen the essential experience of self in such a model. This approach is important as so much of behavioral research has focused on the self as known, in relatively static form, in contrast to the dynamic aspects of the self that unfold in each moment and as a function of context. Simple associative and declarative models of self-representations are not well equipped to handle these nonlinear dynamics, but connectionist models excel at capturing such dynamics (Hopfield, 1982). Although the authors are primarily interested in using connectionism as a tool to model artificial neural architecture that is capable of supporting self-processes, they also stress that such models should be biologically plausible at the neural level. An interest in how the self is neurally instantiated in the living human brain has been investigated in recent years by a growing number of social neuroscientists, who have used functional imaging techniques to attempt to isolate the neural correlates of self-processing. Although the effort to understand how the self is represented in the brain is still in its infancy, such investigations have nonetheless already proven informative and seem well worth reviewing here. Due to the inherent complexities of discussing a phenomena as multifaceted as the self, it may be useful to consider this body of research by parsing it into the follow categories: self-processing versus other social processing, internally-focused versus externally-focused self-processing, and controlled versus automatic aspects of self-processing.