Inferring mental representational structure of the self in time, space, and social dimensions via a modified redundancy gain paradigm

Abstract

The ability to project oneself into an alternative situation is an essential human capacity. While research demonstrating that such abilities underlie human decision-making is abundant, the cognitive organization of the self across social, temporal, and spatial domains–constituting the basic materials for self-projection–is not clear. The current study introduces a new paradigm to gauge the representational overlaps among social (myself), temporal (now), and spatial (here) selves by utilizing a shape-label matching task in a modified redundancy gain paradigm. Based on the level of redundancy gain effects, we infer a representational overlap among social, temporal, and spatial selves in a systematic way. Our results showed that the spatial self resides at the core of self-representation, which conceptually extends to the temporal and ultimately to the social self, echoing the human developmental stages of self-representation and the topographically nested neural structure of self-processing. This novel finding advances the understanding and theorizing of the self-concept as an orderly structured mental construct.