Knowledge about one's personality, the self-concept, shapes human experience. Social cognitive neuroscience has made strides addressing the question of where and how the self is represented in the brain. The answer, however, remains elusive. We conducted two functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments (the second preregistered) with human male and female participants employing a self-reference task with a broad range of attributes and carrying out a searchlight representational similarity analysis (RSA). The importance of attributes to self-identity was represented in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), whereas mPFC activation was unrelated both to self-descriptiveness of attributes (experiments 1 and 2) and importance of attributes to a friend's self-identity (experiment 2). Our research provides a comprehensive answer to the abovementioned question: The self-concept is conceptualized in terms of self-importance and represented in the mPFC.

SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The self-concept comprises beliefs about who one is as an individual (e.g., personality traits, physical characteristics, desires, likes/dislikes, and social roles). Despite researchers' efforts in the last two decades to understand where and how the self-concept is stored in the brain, the question remains elusive. Using a neuroimaging technique, we found that a brain region called medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) shows differential but systematic activation patterns depending on the importance of presented word stimuli to a participant's self-concept. Our findings suggest that one's sense of the self is supported by neural populations in the mPFC, each of which is differently sensitive to distinct levels of the personal importance of incoming information.

关于一个人的个性和自我概念的知识塑造了人类的经历。社会认知神经科学在解决自我在大脑中的位置和方式的问题上取得了长足的进步。然而，答案仍然难以捉摸。我们对人类男性和女性参与者进行了两次功能性磁共振成像实验（第二次是预先注册的），采用具有广泛属性的自我参照任务，并进行探照灯代表性相似性分析（RSA）。属性对自我认同的重要性在内侧前额叶皮层 (mPFC) 中得到体现，而 mPFC 的激活与属性的自我描述性（实验 1 和 2）以及属性对朋友自我认同的重要性（实验 2）无关。 ）。

意义陈述自我概念包括关于一个人是谁的信念（例如，人格特质、身体特征、欲望、喜欢/不喜欢和社会角色）。尽管研究人员在过去二十年中努力了解自我概念在大脑中的存储位置和方式，但这个问题仍然难以捉摸。使用神经成像技术，我们发现称为内侧前额叶皮层（mPFC）的大脑区域显示出差异但系统的激活模式，具体取决于所呈现的单词刺激对参与者自我概念的重要性。我们的研究结果表明，一个人的自我意识是由 mPFC 中的神经群体支持的，每个神经群体对传入信息的个人重要性的不同程度都有不同的敏感度。