The Mechanisms Underlying the Human Minimal Self

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Background

The human self is a particularly colorful concept that occupies a central position in the cognitive and social sciences since their existence. It is the agent that is doing the thinking in Descartes’ quest for the validity of human knowledge, the target of religious and political persuasion, the ultimate goal of personal development and therapeutic intervention, and the key factor in attributing legal and ethical responsibility.

But what is the self? Little is known about how it works, where it comes from, and what its potential might be. Recently, there has been renewed interest in the "minimal self". According to philosophical views, the minimal self (in contrast to a narrative self or verbalized self-concept) refers to a person’s phenomenal experience as an acting and perceiving individual in the here and now. In other words, it describes the pre-reflective representation that emerges from concrete sensorimotor experience. Current research has focused on the sense of agency and body ownership experiences as two central aspects of the minimal self.

However, the psychological basis of the minimal self is not well understood. In fact, there is no truly mechanistic approach that tries to capture the processes underlying the minimal self. However, important methodological developments and the availability of novel research techniques (such as virtual reality and humanoid robotics), the recent increase of interest in the experimental investigation of the minimal self, and the convergence of two lines of cognitive theorizing may result in the next major step in understanding the minimal self.

One existing concept is embodied cognition. There is increasing dissatisfaction with the idea that human cognition is abstract, symbolic, and entirely disembodied. This has stimulated approaches that emphasize the role of people’s active sensorimotor experience in creating knowledge, including knowledge about oneself. While these approaches still lack mechanistic detail, they raise the possibility that the self is not a given, but something that emerges through experience and learning. This implies that we can study and reconstruct this emergence in developmental experiments and create experimental manipulations that provide causal tests of theories by changing self-representation in predicted ways.

The other line of theorizing relates to ideomotor theory. Ideomotor theory seeks to identify the mechanisms underlying goal-directed action and, given the assumed role of sensorimotor experience in creating self-representations, these action mechanisms might also contribute to understanding the mechanisms of self-creation. Unraveling these mechanisms allows researchers to reconstruct selves in artificial agents, which provides a promising testbed for empirical theories of the self. Internal models and mechanisms for internal simulation of sensorimotor activity are promising tools for the implementation of basic cognitive skills in artificial agents. In particular, the ideomotor idea that decision-making is based on the anticipation of action effects plays a central role in predictive-coding approaches to both artificial agents and humans.

Empirical studies of the self strongly benefit from recent methodological developments in various fields. The study of self-development was stimulated by the availability of non-invasive brain imaging techniques, computer-based looking time paradigms, and the fine-grained analysis of eye movements and pupil size, which allow the analysis of cognitive mechanisms even in infants. Converging ideas in developmental psychology and cognitive robotics have created a new interdisciplinary research area called “developmental robotics”, which seeks to implement developmental principles in behaving robots to both make robots smarter and test developmental theories “in silicio”. The availability of humanoid robots that share even basic body and sensorimotor characteristics with humans opens enormous possibilities to empirically test and improve developmental theorizing that is based on sensorimotor experience. Basic cognitive research on the self has strongly benefited from the establishment of paradigms, such as the rubber hand technique, the full-body version, and the combination of the stroking technique with the visual morphing of faces. Additional flexibility was provided by using virtual reality, data gloves, and advanced motion registration, which allows studying sensorimotor experience under very natural conditions.

The aim of this Research Topic is to probe the level and the ambitions of current theorizing about the human minimal self. How far did we get? In particular, how far did we get in understanding the mechanistic basis of the human minimal self? How does it emerge? How is it represented? Is it stable or can it be made to disappear, as Buddhist meditation promises?

These questions can hardly be answered by pointing to a particular brain area or a functional system of which neither the responsible codes nor the operations are specified. What is needed are theoretical assumptions that are sufficiently specific to implement them into an artificial agent and to see whether it can be made to have a self. Any contribution to this question is welcome, including; a theoretical comment that synthesizes available research, a review, a particular cognitive, developmental, or empirical study, a computer simulation, a robot creating a self. The contributions need to go beyond correlational reasoning, by providing truly mechanistic models—or at least concrete ideas that lead us there.

Keywords: human minimal self, embodied cognition, ideomotor theory, developmental robotics

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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