Who am I? Representing oneself according to the Theory of Event Coding (TEC), by Bernhard Hommel

Summary:

This talk is asking the question how we represent ourselves, and it gives an embarrassingly simple answer: just like any other event. I motivate my claim by introducing the Theory of Event Coding (TEC), which claims that perception and action are not only based on shared (i.e., sensorimotor) representations but are in some sense one and the same thing, and describe recent extensions of this theory to include the representation of self and other individuals. These extensions make surprising predictions, of which some have been already tested successfully by using the joint Simon task and virtual reality techniques.

Bernhard Hommel is professor at the Leiden University, Institute of Psychology in the Netherlands