Selfhood and Consciousness: Bodily, Narrative, and Minimal Dimensions of the Conscious Self

The relationship between selfhood and consciousness lies at the heart of contemporary cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind. A central challenge in consciousness research is to explain how subjective experience is organized around a sense of self: a seemingly unified subject who perceives, acts, remembers, and reflects upon the world. Although the self is often experienced as coherent and stable, converging evidence suggests that it is a multidimensional and dynamically constructed phenomenon emerging from interacting bodily, cognitive, affective, and social processes.

Over the past two decades, research on the self has undergone a major transformation. Traditional accounts emphasizing autobiographical narrative and personal identity have been complemented by investigations of the minimal self—the immediate, pre-reflective sense of being a subject of experience. Studies of body ownership, agency, interoception, multisensory integration, and predictive processing have increasingly revealed how fundamental aspects of selfhood arise from ongoing interactions between the brain, body, and environment. At the same time, clinical and experimental perturbations of selfhood, including psychosis and depersonalisation, have demonstrated that core dimensions of selfhood can be modified, attenuated, or even temporarily dissolved, offering unique experimental windows into the mechanisms underlying self-consciousness.

Despite these advances, the field remains fragmented. Research on bodily self-consciousness, agency, narrative identity, self-modeling, and altered self-experience often proceeds in parallel, with limited integration across levels of analysis. A major challenge for contemporary consciousness science is therefore to develop unified frameworks that explain how different dimensions of selfhood interact to generate the experience of being a conscious self.

This Research Topic seeks to advance an interdisciplinary understanding of selfhood as a central component of conscious experience. We welcome contributions that investigate the structure, mechanisms, development, and transformation of self-consciousness from behavioural, phenomenological, neuroscientific, computational, and clinical perspectives. Particular emphasis is placed on research that bridges first-person experience with underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms, and that contributes to integrative theories of the conscious self.

The scope of this Research Topic includes empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions examining self-related processes in humans. Studies focusing exclusively on personality traits, self-esteem, or social identity without addressing mechanisms of conscious self-experience fall outside the scope of this collection.
We welcome original research articles, reviews, theoretical contributions, perspectives, and methodological papers addressing topics including, but not limited to:

• The minimal self and pre-reflective self-awareness
• Body ownership, embodiment, and bodily self-consciousness
• Sense of agency, volition, intentional action, and free will
• Predictive processing, active inference, and computational models of selfhood
• Interoception and the bodily foundations of conscious self-experience
• Narrative identity, autobiographical memory, and temporal continuity of the self
• Neural mechanisms underlying self-related processing and self-consciousness
• Disorders and perturbations of selfhood, including depersonalisation, dissociation, schizophrenia-spectrum conditions, neurological disorders, and experimentally induced alterations.
Artificial agents, self-models, and computational approaches to self-representation
• Neurophenomenology and innovative first-person methodologies for studying subjective experience

By bringing together perspectives from consciousness science, cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, philosophy, and computational modelling, this Research Topic aims to foster a more comprehensive understanding of how selfhood emerges, how it shapes conscious experience, and how its diverse dimensions can be investigated within a unified scientific framework.