COMMENTARIES Thinking about the Self from a Social Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective

Abstract

In this paper Kashima et al. develop an interesting model of self that attempts to simulate several psychological processes critical to an amalgamated James-Mead theoretical conceptualization of self. More specifically, the authors use a connectionist framework to model temporal, cultural and social aspects of self which may give rise to the enculturated stream of consciousness which is seen the essential experience of self in such a model. This approach is important as so much of behavioral research has focused on the self as known, in relatively static form, in contrast to the dynamic aspects of the self that unfold in each moment and as a function of context. Simple associative and declarative models of self-representations are not well equipped to handle these nonlinear dynamics