Dissociating hyper and hypoself biases to a core self-representation

Abstract

Biases to favour self-related information over information related to other people have been demonstrated across a range of both high- and low-level tasks, but it is unclear whether these tasks 'tap' the same types of self representation. Here we assess results from two patients with damage primarily to (i) left ventro-medial prefrontal (vmPFC) cortex and the insula (patient SC), and (ii) temporo-parietal (TP) cortex (patient RR). We report evidence from both low-level perceptual matching tasks and episodic memory showing that SC has a hypoself bias across the tasks. RR in contrast had a hyperself bias confined to perceptual matching. Both patients also showed hypobias effects for reward. We argue that the different brain lesions compromise (i) the use of a core self-representation which modulates both perceptual and memorial levels of processing (the vmPFC), and (ii) attentional responses to social cues (the TP cortex), and, furthermore, these effects can dissociate from those of reward and general effects of brain lesion and/or impaired executive control. We suggest that the vmPFC is critical for access to a core self-representation while TP damage can reduce top-down control of attention to salient stimuli and exaggerates the effects of strong (self-related) attentional signals.

The ubiquitous self: what the properties of self‐bias tell us about the self

“…Neuropsychological evidence also supports the argument for the distinct, and sometimes antagonistic effects of self‐attention and task‐based, executive attention, and for the critical role of the mPFC and the LpSTS in self‐based attention. Sui et al . report data from two patients, one with damage to the mPFC and one with more posterior damage involving the LpSTS.…”

“…Neuropsychological evidence also supports the argument for the distinct, and sometimes antagonistic effects of self-attention and task-based, executive attention, and for the critical role of the mPFC and the LpSTS in self-based attention. Sui et al 81 report data from two patients, one with damage to the mPFC and one with more posterior damage involving the LpSTS. They found that self-bias effects on perceptual matching were reduced in the patient with the mPFC lesion, consistent with damage to the self-representation critical to "drive" attention to self-related items.…”

Aging enhances cognitive biases to friends but not the self

“…These data indicate that attentional-control processes are recruited more strongly in the latter condition (see Sui & Humphreys, 2015a, for a discussion). Additionally, neuropsychological studies have shown that brain lesion over the VMPFC abolishes self biases in memory, whereas brain damage in the dorsal attentional-control network that spares the VMPFC generates abnormally large biases toward self-related stimuli, due to an exaggerated effect of strong attentional signals (Sui, Enock, Ralph, & Humphreys, 2015). Researchers have argued that self-bias effects are determined by the interaction between the ventral network through the VMPFC and the dorsal attentional-control network for control of behavior (Sui, 2016).…”

Connectivity between ventromedial prefrontal cortex and posterior superior temporal sulcus

“…This would not fit with available neuropsychological evidence (Sui, Enock, Ralph, & Humphreys, 2015). These lesion data show that damage to pSTS increases self-bias effects, while damage to vmPFC decreases them.…”