The Me-File: An Event-Coding Approach to Self-Representation

Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, pp. 698778

Abstract

Numerous authors have taken it for granted that people represent themselves or even have something like "a self", but the underlying mechanisms remain a mystery. How do people represent themselves? Here I propose that they do so not any differently from how they represent other individuals, events, and objects: by binding codes representing the sensory consequences of being oneself into a Me-File, that is, into an event file integrating all the codes resulting from the behaving me. This amounts to a Humean bundle-self theory of selfhood, and I will explain how recent extensions of the Theory of Event Coding, a general theory of human perception and action control, provide all the necessary ingredients for specifying the mechanisms underlying such a theory. The Me-File concept is likely to provide a useful mechanistic basis for more specific and more theoretically productive experimentation, as well as for the construction of artificial agents with human-like selves.

Authors 1

1. Bernhard Hommel corresponding Aachen Cognitive Psychology Unit Institute for Psychological Research & Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition

   Leiden University · Technische Universität Dresden · Shandong Normal University

   Affiliation as printed

   Cognitive Neurophysiology, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany

   Cognitive Psychology Unit, Institute for Psychological Research & Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands

   Department of Psychology, Shandong Normal University, Jinan, China