Set 1 – Self-perception

Social cognition

Mental processes for understanding ourselves, others, and social situations.

Social neuroscience

Study of how brain systems support social behavior and cognition.

Self-reference effect

Self-related information is often processed and remembered better.

Cocktail party effect

Personally relevant information, such as your name, captures attention in noise.

Depth-of-processing hypothesis

Self-related material is remembered better because it receives deeper semantic processing.

Dedicated brain network hypothesis

Self-processing preferentially engages specialized neural circuits, particularly mPFC.

Kelley et al. (2002)

Compared self-trait, other-trait, and letter-case judgments; found self-related mPFC activity.

Medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC)

Contributes to self-referential thought and inferences about other people.

Trait inference

Drawing conclusions about stable personality characteristics from information or behavior.

Self-semantic knowledge

General knowledge about one's personality and stable personal characteristics.

Autobiographical episodic memory

Recollection of a specific personally experienced event.

Klein et al. (1992)

Used self-judgment, autobiographical recall, and definition tasks to study self-knowledge.

Self-knowledge in amnesia

Stable self-trait knowledge can remain despite impaired autobiographical memory.

Default mode network (DMN)

Brain network active during internally directed thought, memory, and mentalizing.

Posterior cingulate cortex (PCC)

Posterior DMN region associated with integration of internally oriented information.

Medial temporal cortex

Supports memory-related processes within the broader default network.

Rest-related mPFC activity

mPFC often remains active at rest and may deactivate during external tasks.

Self–other neural overlap

Thinking about oneself and close others can recruit partly overlapping mPFC regions.

Body ownership

The subjective experience that a body or body part belongs to oneself.

Sense of agency

The experience of being the person who caused an action.