Modeling Awareness for the Self and Others

Abstract

Understanding the minds of others is a crucial ability for humankind. However, one fundamentalaspect of this, how the awareness of others is modeled and where this ability is rooted in the brain, is still not well understood. The experiments described in this dissertation investigate how individuals understand and reconstruct the awareness and attention of others and the ways these processes relate to the construction of their own awareness. The study presented in chapter 2 offers evidence that the ways in which individuals use and combine information to assess others’ awareness is closely tied to their social cognitive ability. Chapters 3 and 4 provide evidence that an individual's attentional biases seem to transfer when modeling the attention of others, demonstrating a tight relationship between understanding others’ attention and one’s own. Finally, the studies presented in chapters 5 and 6 suggest that areas of the brain responsible for cognition about others represent rich content of another agent's awareness as well as details about the agent's attention. These studies provide support for the concept that models of the self and models of others have shared mechanisms that may rely on the same underlying neural substrates.