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

Bernhard Hommel

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.698778

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.

Highlights

Like many other concepts used in academic psychology, the concept of the “self ” is rather uncritically taken to refer to something residing in the human mind or brain or both that creates some degree of unity of either the phenomenal experience that we have with or about us or the stories that we are telling about us
I have suggested that what philosophical approaches have considered the key ingredients of the human self—body ownership and agency—do not require any special theorizing or any dedicated system or mechanism
Reports about body ownership and agency are likely to be based on the same principles that underlie the judgment of relatedness and causality regarding non-personal events, like the motions of billiard balls and, in the case of agency, on comparisons between intended and actual action effects, as available from action-control processes

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Like many other concepts used in academic psychology, the concept of the “self ” is rather uncritically taken to refer to something residing in the human mind or brain or both that creates some degree of unity of either the phenomenal experience that we have with or about us or the stories that we are telling about us. According to TEC, being exposed to a situation, being engaged in a task, and being busy with particular themes increases the intentional weighting (Hommel et al, 2001; Memelink and Hommel, 2013) of feature dimensions that the agent considers relevant (based on past experience and current expectations) for making the right choices under these situational circumstances This means that feature values that are coded on these dimensions are activated more strongly and have a higher impact to impact decisionmaking and action-selection. Each feature code that is part of the current self must be consistently primed to at least some degree, depending on the degree of intentional weighting Connecting these two considerations suggests that the act that phenomenologically consists in committing to a goal or intention reflects the mechanistic process of merging the representation of this goal/intention with the Me-file (similar to the assumption of Salancik, 1977, that commitment represents a kind of binding between an individual and her actions). As the Mefile suggests, action is such an important ingredient of selfrepresentation, explorative, active learning would be mandated for possible educational reasons and for the building of active self ’s, that is, for identities that include the agentive aspect of individuals

CONCLUSION

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT