External Seminar: The Integrative Self: what the properties of self- prioritisation tell us about the self

Abstract

In this talk I will present evidence using a newly developed ‘self association procedure’ which we have used to study the impact of self reference on information processing in healthy adults and patients. We use the behavioural and neuroimaging evidence to argue about the relations between self-prioritisation in attention, perception and memory and prioritisation based on emotion and reward. The results indicate that self-reference plays a particular functional role in cognition. I discuss the implications of the work for understanding a wide range of disorders related to self-processing, as well as social cognition in general.