The human ability to mentally place oneself in the past and future (i.e., mental time travel) or in counterfactual scenarios (i.e., alternative outcomes) and so scrutinize one’s own ideas is referred to as autonoetic consciousness. Furthermore, autonoetic consciousness includes behaviors such as mental time travel, self-projection, and episodic future thinking, all of which have been proposed as exclusively human capacities.
The sense of self influences one’s conduct in the present, past, and future. It relates to how one reflects on their own prior behavior, how they feel about it, and whether or not they repeat it. Episodic memory is concerned with self-awareness, memories of the self, and inward thoughts that may be projected onto an individual’s future actions.
Self Identity
Autonoetic consciousness is important in our formation of our “self” identity. What we have done in the past becomes a part of our “self” and the ability to reflect on this influences our behavior in the now.
Conscious self-representation is required for a cohesive and meaningful life. It is considered that autonoetic consciousness emerges from the recall of memories of personally experienced events (episodic memory). Without the ability to reflect on our prior experiences, we would be perpetually awake, without a history and hence unable to prepare for the future.
Autobiographical memories can be retrieved in either the first-person perspective, where people see the event through their own eyes, or the third-person, where people see themselves and the event through the eyes of an outside observer. A growing body of research suggests that the visual perspective from which memory is retrieved has important implications for a person’s thoughts, feelings, and goals, and is integrally related to a host of self- evaluative processes.
Event-related Potentials
An event-related potential (ERP) is a brain response that is assessed as a direct result of a sensory, cognitive, or motor event. In more academic terms, it refers to any stereotyped electrophysiological response to a stimuli. This method of studying the brain provides a noninvasive technique of evaluating brain functioning.
ERP is currently one of the most commonly used methods in cognitive neuroscience research to investigate the physiological correlates of sensory, perceptual, and cognitive activity associated with information processing.
A 1994 ERP study of human recognition memory explored the relationship between conscious awareness and electrophysiological activity of the brain. ERPs were collected from healthy adults while they made “remember” and “know” recognition judgments about previously seen words, reflecting “Autonoetic” and “Noetic” awareness, respectively. The ERP effects differed between the two kinds of awareness while they were similar for “true” and “false” recognition.
In a later study of real-time noninvasive recordings of the brain’s electrical activity (event-related potentials, ERPs), there was a common neural “signature” that is associated with self-referential processing regardless of whether subjects are retrieving general knowledge (noetic awareness) or re-experiencing past episodes (autonoetic awareness).
References:
- Baddeley, A., Eysenck, M. W., & Anderson, M. C., Memory. London & New York: Psychology Press
- Duzel, Emrah; Yonelinas, Andrew P.; Mangun, George R.; Heinze, Hans-Jochen; Tulving, Endel (1997). Event-Related Brain Potential Correlates of Two States of Conscious Awareness in Memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 94 (11): 5973–5978
- Lou, Hans C.; Luber, Bruce; Crupain, Michael; Keenan, Julian P.; Nowak, Markus; Kjaer, Troels W.; Sackeim, Harold A.; Lisanby, Sarah H. (2004). Parietal Cortex and Representation of the Mental Self. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 101 (17): 6827–6832. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0400049101
- Luck SJ (2005). An Introduction to the Event-Related Potential Technique. The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-12277-1
- Magno, Elena; Allan, Kevin (2007). Self-Reference During Explicit Memory Retrieval: An Event-Related Potential Analysis. Psychological Science. 18 (8): 672–677. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01957.x
- Sutin, Angelina R.; Robins, Richard W. (2008). When the ‘I’ Looks at the ‘Me’: Autobiographical Memory, Visual Perspective, and the Self. Consciousness and Cognition. 17 (4): 1386–1397. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2008.09.001