| The emergence of self-awareness and mental state attribution in early development (approximately 2 years of age) is paralleled by an increasing growth in the prefrontal cortex. Research on normal adults has shown that the right prefrontal cortex is associated with processing several types of information about the self (e.g., self-faces, episodic memories, theory of mind, etc.). As a way of testing the hypothesis that there may be a specific neurological network dedicated to processing information about the self I conducted eight experiments aimed to elucidate three factors of self-processing: personality, sensory, and emotional. The first experiment is a replication of the left-hand advantage for self-face processing. In Experiment 2 I show that schizotypal personality traits can affect the left-hand advantage for self-face processing. Experiment 3 looks at olfactory self-recognition. I found that females, but not males, excel at olfactory self-recognition and that a female's ability to identify her own odor is not a function of how she subjectively perceives the odor, but is negatively affected by schizotypal personality traits. Experiment 4 investigates contagious yawning as a form of mental state attribution. I show that contagious yawning is related to both performance on theory of mind tasks and self-face recognition, as well as negatively affected by schizotypal personality traits. Experiments 5, 6, and 7 were designed to identify sensory cross-modalities of self-processing. In this series of experiments I show that self-information processing across sensory domains (visual self-face, visual self-name, auditory self-name, and self-odor) interact facilitatively indicative of shared cognitive processing and possibly shared neural substrates. Experiment 8 was designed to determine whether right hemisphere lateralization of self-face processing was simply a function of the right hemisphere being implicated in processing emotional stimuli. I measured reaction times to hand response asymmetry to self-faces in different emotional expressions. Together these data extend previous research on self-recognition by incorporating investigations of differences in self-recognition as a function of schizotypal personality traits. These data also extend previous findings that concentrated on self-face recognition to include investigations of the cross-modal sensory aspects of self-recognition, and support the notion that self-face processing is independent of emotional processing. |
