Is the self special in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex? An fMRI study

Abstract

In recent years, several neuroimaging studies have suggested that the neural basis of the self-referential process1 is special, especially in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). However, it remains controversial whether activity of the MPFC (and other related brain regions) appears only during the self-referential process. We investigated the neural correlates during the processing of references to the self, close other (friend), and distant other (prime minister) using fMRI. In comparison with baseline findings, referential processing to the three kinds of persons defined above showed common activation patterns in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), left middle temporal gyrus, left angular gyrus, posterior cingulate cortex and right cerebellum. Additionally, percent changes in BOLD signal in five regions of interest demonstrated the same findings. The result indicated that DMPFC was not special for the self-referential process, while there are common neural bases for evaluating the personalities of the self and others.

¹In this article, we define self-“related” processing as a wide variety of information processing to address every stimulus related to the self, and self-“referential” processing as a type of self-related processing that especially needs to access self-representation composed of the self-concept, autobiographical memory and so on.

Keywords:

• Self reference
• Other reference
• DMPFC
• fMRI

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Grants #19203032 to Naoyuki Osaka and #08330156 to Mariko Osaka.

Notes

¹In this article, we define self-“related” processing as a wide variety of information processing to address every stimulus related to the self, and self-“referential” processing as a type of self-related processing that especially needs to access self-representation composed of the self-concept, autobiographical memory and so on.