Human-brain SVG By Hugh Guiney, CC BY-SA 3.0
Human-brain SVG By Hugh Guiney, CC BY-SA 3.0

This brain region is a bit of a narcissist

Embargoed until: Publicly released:
Peer-reviewed: This work was reviewed and scrutinised by relevant independent experts.

Experimental study: At least one thing in the experiment was changed to see if it had an impact on the subjects (often people or animals) – eg: changing the amount of time mice spend on an exercise wheel to find out what impact it has on weight loss.

Observational study: A study in which the subject is observed to see if there is a relationship between two or more things (eg: the consumption of diet drinks and obesity). Observational studies cannot prove that one thing causes another, only that they are linked.

People: This is a study based on research using people.

We're great at noticing information about ourselves and remembering it thanks to a brain region called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), which is involved in processing information about the self, according to Chinese and US scientists. They scanned the brains of people who were trying to remember the location of different coloured dots on a screen representing themselves, a friend, or a stranger. They found participants were faster at recalling the location of the 'me' dot than the others, even though it was just a dot and had no real connection to them. The brain scans showed that the VMPFC lit up only when people were considering the 'me' dot, but when the scientists used electricity to disable the VMPFC, people were no faster at recalling their dot than the others.

Journal/conference: JNeurosci

Organisation/s: Southwest University, China

Funder: This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31771254), and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2019M663425), and the fellowship of China National Postdoctoral Program for Innovative Talents (BX20200283).

Media release

From: Society for Neuroscience

The Brain Region Responsible for Self-Bias in Memory
Region involved in processing information about the self skews working memory

A brain region involved in processing information about ourselves biases our ability to remember, according to new research published in JNeurosci.

People are good at noticing information about themselves, like when your eye jumps to your name in a long list or you manage to hear someone address you in a noisy crowd. This self-bias extends to working memory, the ability to actively think about and manipulate bits of information: people are also better at remembering things about themselves.

To pinpoint the source of this bias, Yin et al. measured participants’ brain activity in an fMRI scanner while they tried to remember the location of different colored dots representing themselves, a friend, or a stranger. The participants’ fastest response time came when recalling the dot representing themselves, even though it was an arbitrary connection. When people held the self-representing dot in working memory, they had greater activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) — an area involved in processing self-relevant information. Greater synchrony between the VMPFC and working memory regions corresponded to faster response times. When the researchers interfered with VMPFC activity with transcranial direct current stimulation, the self-bias disappeared, indicating activity in the region drives the bias.

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