Kotlewska Ilona, Nowicka Anna
Department of Neurophysiology, Laboratory of Psychophysiology, Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, 3 Pasteur Street, 02-093 Warsaw, Poland.
Eur J Neurosci. 2016 Aug;44(4):2064-71. doi: 10.1111/ejn.13293. Epub 2016 Jun 28.
Information regarding the past-self may be viewed as information referring to other people. However, evidence supporting this notion at the neural level is rather sparse and it remains unclear whether the past-self is processed like any 'other' or like the close-other only. The aim of this event-related potential study was to investigate this issue. A reflection task requiring evaluation of positive and negative trait adjectives with respect to present- and past-self, a close-other and a famous person was applied. We hypothesized that the past-self and close-other conditions would share their neural underpinnings. The process of reflection on the past-self and close-other was indeed associated with similar mean amplitudes of the late positive component (LPC), whereas in the case of the past-self vs. famous person comparison LPC was significantly enhanced for the past-self. Analogous effects were observed when LPC was calculated for trials with traits judged as either suitable or unsuitable to describe a person who was the target of reflection. Thus, these findings suggest that the processing of information related to the past-self resembles processing of information related to a personally relevant other. Moreover, sex-differences were observed in reaction times and LPC amplitudes for responses reflecting the positivity bias.
关于过去自我的信息可能被视为与他人相关的信息。然而，在神经层面支持这一概念的证据相当稀少，过去自我是否像任何“他人”一样被处理，还是仅像亲密他人一样被处理，仍不清楚。这项事件相关电位研究的目的是调查这个问题。应用了一项反思任务，要求对与当前自我、过去自我、亲密他人和名人相关的积极和消极特质形容词进行评估。我们假设过去自我和亲密他人的情况会有共同的神经基础。对过去自我和亲密他人的反思过程确实与晚期正成分（LPC）的相似平均幅值相关，而在过去自我与名人比较的情况下，过去自我的LPC显著增强。当对被判断为适合或不适合描述反思对象的特质的试验计算LPC时，也观察到了类似的效应。因此，这些发现表明，与过去自我相关的信息处理类似于与个人相关的他人的信息处理。此外，在反映积极偏差的反应时间和LPC幅值方面观察到了性别差异。
