GOALIATH: a theory of goal-directed behavior

Exogenous attention and its relationship with working memory contents: beyond spatial selection

To successfully perform everyday activities, cognitive functions such as working memory (WM) and selective attention are necessary. Specifically, when environmental demands are dynamic, exogenous attention is crucial. However, its ability to select and prioritize not only perceptual spatial locations, but also novel stimulus-response (S-R) bindings held in WM remains largely unexplored. By implementing a retro-cueing paradigm on a task that capitalized on WM, the present experiment's aim was two-fold: i) to evaluate whether exogenous cueing effects would not only impact spatial processing but also WM content, and ii) to explore how meta-control states induced by the manipulation of an intervening event (IE) would modulate these effects. We observed (N = 50) that exogenous attention led to selection of space, as it is usually observed in spatial exogenous attention paradigms, but also the content associated with that location. Moreover, space selection was modulated by the IE manipulation, which was thought to induce two meta-control states (persistent vs. flexible). As such, the presence of the IE also modulated participants' performance regarding novel vs. repeated stimulus-response mappings, again hinting at an important role of content in this task. This pattern of findings fits well with the concept of event file; a mental representation of all relevant components assembled at the beginning of a trial (i.e., cue, target, lateralization, meta-control state, etc.), which are retrieved together once one or more of its elements are encountered. Although preliminary, this evidence of exogenous attentional selection of WM through event file activation paves the way for a promising research line.

Intrinsic motivations in health and fitness app engagement: A mediation model of entertainment

Objective

This study aims to investigate the intrinsic motivations driving continued usage of health and fitness apps, addressing a gap in the literature where user motivation has received limited attention. The study focuses on the role of entertainment as a mediator between intrinsic motivations and continuance intention, using the Uses and Gratifications Theory as a conceptual framework.

Methods

Data were collected through an online survey of 2869 health and fitness app users in Vietnam. Intrinsic motivations were categorized into challenge, curiosity, fantasy, and social interaction. Hypotheses were tested using SEM, and subgroup analyses were conducted to examine variations across demographic groups.

Results

The findings reveal that entertainment mediates the relationship between intrinsic motivations and continuance intention, with challenge and curiosity being the strongest predictors of sustained app usage. Challenge also demonstrated a direct effect on continuance intention, independent of entertainment. Demographic analysis indicated that males are primarily motivated by challenge and curiosity, while females and higher-income users are driven more by curiosity.

Conclusion

This study highlights the importance of intrinsic motivations in shaping user engagement with health and fitness apps. Practical implications include the need for app developers to design features that align with user motivations, such as gamified challenges, personalized content, and interactive elements. Future research should explore extrinsic motivations and validate the framework across other digital platforms to expand its applicability.

Directed connectivity in theta networks supports action-effect integration

The ability to plan and carry out goal-directed behavior presupposes knowledge about the contingencies between movements and their effects. Ideomotor accounts of action control assume that agents integrate action-effect contingencies by creating action-effect bindings, which associate movement patterns with their sensory consequences. However, the neurophysiological underpinnings of action-effect binding are not yet well understood. Given that theta band activity has been linked to information integration, we thus studied action-effect integration in an electrophysiological study with N = 31 healthy individuals with a strong focus on theta band activity. We examined how information between functional neuroanatomical structures is exchanged to enable action planning. We show that theta band activity in a network encompassing the insular cortex (IC), the anterior temporal lobe (ATL), and the inferior frontal cortex (IFC) supports the establishment of action-effect bindings. All regions revealed bi-directional effective connectivities, indicating information transfer between these regions. The IC and ATL create a loop for information integration and the conceptual abstraction of it. The involvement of anterior regions of the IFC, particularly during the acquisition phase of the action-effect, likely reflects episodic control mechanisms in which a past event defines a "template" of what action-effect is to be expected. Taken together, the current findings connect well with major cognitive concepts. Our study suggests a functional relevance of theta band activity in an IC-ATL-IFC network, which in turn implies that basic ideomotor action-effect integration is implemented through theta band activity and effective connectivities between temporo-frontal structures.

Improving the provision of clinical pharmacy services in low- and middle-income countries: a qualitative study in tertiary health facilities in Tanzania

Background

The provision of clinical pharmacy services (CPS) in low- and middle-income countries is still low. The reported challenges in providing CPS include healthcare structures, public policies, resources, workforce, culture and education inequalities. This study aimed to explore the strategies to improve the provision of CPS in tertiary health facilities in Tanzania.

Methods

This study was conducted between August and September 2021. We adopted an exploratory qualitative study to conduct 14 in-depth interviews with hospital administrators and 10 focus group discussions (FGDs) with healthcare providers. A purposeful sampling technique was used to recruit 97 participants, including 45 pharmacists, 31 medical doctors and 21 nurses across five tertiary healthcare institutions. Of those, 14 hospital administrators participated in 14 IDIs and 83 healthcare workers divided into 10 FGDs. Analysis was done using a qualitative thematic approach.

Results

The study identified several strategies that fall under four major themes: (i) strengthen preservice training by reviewing the Bachelor of Pharmacy training curriculum to include clinical pharmacy components; (ii) improve continuing professional training through regular provision of on-job training to pharmacists; (iii) revise the scope of work for pharmacists to include CPS provision in the job description; and (iv) improve operational environment by ensuring availability of guidelines, policies, and adequate number of pharmacists and good inter-professional communication skills.

Conclusions

This study's findings highlight that improving CPS provision requires strengthening pharmacists' training, scope of work and operational environment. The latter calls for multifaceted engagement from pharmacists, training institutions, policymakers, regulatory bodies and health systems for sustainable progress.

How a co-actor's (Un-) reliability modulates goal selection in a novel joint goal-setting paradigm

Sociomotor theory - an extension of ideomotor theory - suggests that actions can also be represented in terms of the effects they elicit from others. But what if those others violate one's action effect anticipations? Here, we introduce a novel joint goal-setting paradigm to investigate effects of co-actors' occasional and overall unreliability on an individual's goal selection. In a first step, the participant moved a target halfway from the bottom center to the top left or right corner of the computer screen. In the second step, the co-actor moved the target to its final left or right position. In a learning block, the co-actor always continued the participant's target movements. In the test block(s), the co-actor produced congruent action effects in 50% (unreliable) vs. 80% (reliable co-actor) of the trials. Experiment 1 consisted of one (between-participants), Experiment 2 and 3 of two (within-participants) test blocks; in Experiment 3, the co-actor changed between blocks. Results of Experiments 1 and 3 reveal that participants repeated their corner choice more often after incongruent trials, but only when the co-actor was generally reliable. Implications in terms of sociomotor action control and joint action are discussed.

Category-specific general Pavlovian-instrumental transfer

Modern living is characterized by easy access to highly palatable energy-dense foods. Environmental cues associated with palatable foods increase seeking of those foods (specific transfer) and other palatable foods (general transfer). We conducted a series of studies testing the boundaries of food cue-reactivity by evaluating the impact of broader flavor associations (i.e. saltiness, sweetness) in eliciting general transfer effects. Experiment 1 was an online experiment with fictive rewards that tested if two actions associated with different food rewards (chip and chocolate points) could be provoked by images of other foods that were either similar or distinct in flavor from the foods associated with these instrumental actions. We observed that response excitation was only elicited by similarly flavored food cues, whereas distinctly flavored food cues inhibited response rates relative to control cues. Experiment 2 confirmed this observation in a classroom setting where real food rewards were contingent on task performance. Experiment 3 was an online study that further confirmed the reliability of the effects with a well powered sample. There were moderate-to-strong associations between specific and general transfer effects across all studies, suggesting overlapping cognitive processes are responsible for both transfer effects. These data improve the mechanistic understanding of how broad category associations can moderate the impact of food cues on food choices. This knowledge could be helpful for improving the precision of psychological interventions that seek to mitigate the impact of food cue-reactivity.

Habitualness, reward and external constraints: Exploring the underlying influences of daily water intake using the Situated Assessment Method2

Understanding what facilitates and hinders water drinking is crucial to inform interventions for preventing underhydration. Using the Situated Assessment Method2, we extended previous research by examining what influences water drinking in daily life. We studied 213 UK adults, assessing 13 potential predictors (e.g. thirst, availability of other drinks) of their typical water intake across 10 everyday situations (e.g. during work, dinner). Participants then reported their actual water intake in these situations over three alternating days during a 1-week follow-up. We evaluated the variability of water intake and its influences across individuals and situations and the prospective relationship between these influences and water intake. The 13 identified predictors explained substantial proportions of variation in water intake. Factors like habitualness (e.g. subjective effort), self-relevance (e.g. health consciousness) and immediate feedback (e.g. taste) were positively associated with water intake. However, the influence of these factors varied significantly across individuals and situations. Our results suggest that various interrelated predictors facilitate and hinder water drinking behaviour, emphasising the importance of using comprehensive behaviour theories to inform research in this domain. They also align with growing evidence that reward may regulate habitual behaviour.

C-SMB 2.0: Integrating over 25 years of motor sequencing research with the Discrete Sequence Production task

An exhaustive review is reported of over 25 years of research with the Discrete Sequence Production (DSP) task as reported in well over 100 articles. In line with the increasing call for theory development, this culminates into proposing the second version of the Cognitive framework of Sequential Motor Behavior (C-SMB 2.0), which brings together known models from cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and motor learning. This processing framework accounts for the many different behavioral results obtained with the DSP task and unveils important properties of the cognitive system. C-SMB 2.0 assumes that a versatile central processor (CP) develops multimodal, central-symbolic representations of short motor segments by repeatedly storing the elements of these segments in short-term memory (STM). Independently, the repeated processing by modality-specific perceptual and motor processors (PPs and MPs) and by the CP when executing sequences gradually associates successively used representations at each processing level. The high dependency of these representations on active context information allows for the rapid serial activation of the sequence elements as well as for the executive control of tasks as a whole. Speculations are eventually offered as to how the various cognitive processes could plausibly find their neural underpinnings within the intricate networks of the brain.

The Role of Stimulus Uncertainty and Curiosity in Attention Control

Most cognitive psychological studies assume that participants in lab-based tasks maintain a single goal based on task instructions. However, people can be motivated by other factors, such as curiosity. We examined if people attend to seemingly task-irrelevant information out of curiosity by manipulating stimulus uncertainty in a cueing paradigm. Participants were presented with an abrupt-onset cue followed by a letter target (E or H). Next, a mask either at the target location (low uncertainty) or at all four locations (high uncertainty) was shown. We expected high uncertainty to induce a state of curiosity that in turn influences the processing of the cue. Cueing effects were greater in the high-uncertainty condition compared to the low-uncertainty condition. In Experiment 2, we additionally elicited self-report ratings on curiosity. In sum, target-specific uncertainty leads to greater processing of task-irrelevant peripheral cues across two experiments. We tentatively conclude that uncertainty modulates attention control and further research is necessary to examine if this is indeed due to curiosity induced by uncertainty.

EEG-based multivariate pattern analysis reveals the control mechanisms of emotion regulation through distancing

Background/objective

A neurocognitive model of distancing has systematically identified a set of brain regions that support the control mechanisms for emotion regulation (ER). However, the temporal dynamics of these control mechanisms during ER remains unclear.

Method

To address this issue, we recorded behavioral and electroencephalogram (EEG) data to compare proactive and reactive ER modes in an adapted ER task (N = 30 adults). In different ER modes, participants were instructed to downregulate their negative emotional experiences by applying the reappraisal tactic of distancing.

Results

The behavioral results showed that proactive ER, which involves preparing for the upcoming regulation, reduced the negative emotional experience more than reactive ER, which involves no preparation process, in the reappraisal-negative condition. This indicated that proactive ER was more effective than reactive ER in regulating negative emotions. Event-related potential (ERP) and multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) results showed that ER through distancing involved two phases: First, the reappraisal cue enhanced the allocation of attention to activate the mental building blocks and constructed a new perspective in the preparation process. Second, participants who benefited from the preparation process initiated the ER earlier and adaptively re-engaged in the ER if time permitted.

Conclusions

Taken together, the control mechanisms underlying the preparation process influence the timing of ER, while the control mechanisms underlying the regulation process determine the regulatory effect.

Factors associated with intention of clinical pharmacists and candidates to provide pharmaceutical care: application of theory planned behaviour

BACKGROUND

Postgraduate education programs in clinical pharmacy have become widespread in Türkiye. This study aimed to identify factors associated with the intention of Turkish clinical pharmacists and candidates (who were graduates and students of postgraduate clinical pharmacy programs) to provide pharmaceutical care.

METHODS

This prospective observational study was conducted between June 2021 and May 2022. After searching relevant studies, an expert panel discussion, translation, cultural adaptation, and a pilot study developed a 52-item Turkish scale based on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TBP). Cronbach alpha for each construct was calculated after an explanatory factor and test-retest reliability analysis. An online survey link was sent to all graduates or candidates of postgraduate clinical pharmacy programs in Türkiye. After univariate regression analysis, the multiple linear regression model was performed.

RESULTS

One hundred fifty-six participants completed the survey (response rate: 59.1%). The Cronbach's alpha for attitude (9 items), subjective norm (6 items), perceived behavioural control (5 items), self-efficacy (6 items), intention (11 items) and past behaviour (15 items) were 0.945, 0.720, 0.751, 0.864, 0.934 and 0.955 respectively. The multiple linear regression analysis found a higher score of the subjective norm (p = 0.016), a higher score of self-efficacy (p < 0.001), younger age (p < 0.001) and having PhD (p = 0.038) were associated with increased intention score.

CONCLUSIONS

It was shown that higher self efficacy and positive beliefs of their peers and other healthcare professionals were associated with their higher intention score for providing pharmaceutical care. Younger age and having a PhD were other factors associated with their intention to provide pharmaceutical care.

Having multiple selves helps learning agents explore and adapt in complex changing worlds

Satisfying a variety of conflicting needs in a changing environment is a fundamental challenge for any adaptive agent. Here, we show that designing an agent in a modular fashion as a collection of subagents, each dedicated to a separate need, powerfully enhanced the agent's capacity to satisfy its overall needs. We used the formalism of deep reinforcement learning to investigate a biologically relevant multiobjective task: continually maintaining homeostasis of a set of physiologic variables. We then conducted simulations in a variety of environments and compared how modular agents performed relative to standard monolithic agents (i.e., agents that aimed to satisfy all needs in an integrated manner using a single aggregate measure of success). Simulations revealed that modular agents a) exhibited a form of exploration that was intrinsic and emergent rather than extrinsically imposed; b) were robust to changes in nonstationary environments, and c) scaled gracefully in their ability to maintain homeostasis as the number of conflicting objectives increased. Supporting analysis suggested that the robustness to changing environments and increasing numbers of needs were due to intrinsic exploration and efficiency of representation afforded by the modular architecture. These results suggest that the normative principles by which agents have adapted to complex changing environments may also explain why humans have long been described as consisting of "multiple selves."

The contribution of the basal ganglia and cerebellum to motor learning: A neuro-computational approach

Motor learning involves a widespread brain network including the basal ganglia, cerebellum, motor cortex, and brainstem. Despite its importance, little is known about how this network learns motor tasks and which role different parts of this network take. We designed a systems-level computational model of motor learning, including a cortex-basal ganglia motor loop and the cerebellum that both determine the response of central pattern generators in the brainstem. First, we demonstrate its ability to learn arm movements toward different motor goals. Second, we test the model in a motor adaptation task with cognitive control, where the model replicates human data. We conclude that the cortex-basal ganglia loop learns via a novelty-based motor prediction error to determine concrete actions given a desired outcome, and that the cerebellum minimizes the remaining aiming error.

Vicarious ostracism reduces observers' sense of agency

Previous findings revealed that social ostracism reduces people's implicit sense of agency. Based on theoretical claims that observed behavior of others may be cognitively represented similarly to one's own behavior, we conducted two experiments to test whether people's own sense of agency can also be impaired by observed social exclusion of others. In Experiment 1, participants recalled episodes referring to vicarious ostracism or inclusion before completing a temporal interval estimation task to assess intentional binding effects (an established implicit measure of the sense of agency). In Experiment 2, participants immersed into a newly designed virtual Cyberball game, in which they witnessed a vicarious ostracism or inclusion scenario, before completing a Libet-style temporal estimation task and an agency questionnaire (an explicit measure of the sense of agency). The findings show, for the first time, that vicarious ostracism reduces both implicit and explicit measures of agency in observers.

A diffusion model for the congruency sequence effect

Two-choice reaction tasks for which stimuli differ on irrelevant and relevant dimensions (e.g., Simon, flanker, and Stroop tasks) show congruency effects. The diffusion model for conflict tasks (DMC) has provided a quantitative account of the mechanisms underlying decisions in such conflict tasks, but it has not been applied to the congruency sequence effect (CSE) for which the congruency on the prior trial influences performance on the current trial. The present study expands analysis of the reaction time (RT) distributions reflected by delta plots to the CSE, and then extends the DMC to simulate the results. With increasing RT: (1) the spatial Simon effect was almost unchanged following congruent trials but initially became smaller and finally reversed following incongruent trials; (2) the arrow-based Simon effects increased following both congruent and incongruent trials, but more so for the former than the latter; (3) the flanker congruency effect varied quadratically following congruent trials but increased linearly following incongruent trials. These results were modeled by the CSE-DMC, extended from the DMC with two additional assumptions: (1) feature integration influences only the controlled processes; (2) following incongruent trials, the automatic process is weakened. The results fit better with the CSE-DMC than with two variants that separately had only one of the two additional assumptions. These findings indicate that the CSEs for different conflict tasks have disparate RT distributions and that these disparities are likely due to the controlled and automatic processes being influenced differently for each trial sequence.

You have to let go sometimes: advances in understanding goal disengagement

While research on tenacious goal pursuit and persistence has evoked a myriad of research efforts, research on goal disengagement has rather been neglected and has been focusing mainly on positive consequences of individual differences in goal disengagement capacities. In recent years, however, research on goal disengagement has seen an upsurge in studies, specifically addressing the conceptualization of goal disengagement, the processes involved, and factors facilitating or undermining it. However, many questions remain unanswered or only partly answered providing numerous opportunities for further investigation. With this special issue of Motivation and Emotion, we aim to stimulate such progress in research on goal disengagement. To this end, this special issue includes empirical studies with cross-sectional, prospective, longitudinal, and experimental designs with a wide range of personal and experimentally induced goals as well as invited commentaries from scholars across different psychological sub disciplines. In this introductory essay, we provide a brief review of the current state of goal disengagement research. We also provide an overview about the contributions to this special issue with reflections related to the current state of research and areas where further advancement in conceptualization and empirical studies is needed.

Measuring task structure with transitional response times: Task representations are more than task sets

The structure of task representations is widely studied with task-switching procedures in which the experimenter compares performance across predetermined categories of trial transitions (viz., switch costs). This approach has been productive, but relies on experimental assumptions about the relationships among stimulus-response mappings that define a set. Here, we develop a novel method of evaluating structure without relying on such assumptions. Participants responded to centrally presented stimuli and we computed the transitional response times (RTs; changes in RT as a function of specific response sequences) for each response combination. Conventional task-switch analyses revealed costs when the response switched from the left-side to the right or vice versa, but this switch cost was not affected by whether the stimuli belonged to a single category or to two distinct categories. In contrast, the transitional RT analysis provided fine-grained information about relationships among responses and how these relationships were affected by stimulus and response manipulations. Specifically, tasks containing a single stimulus category produced response chains in which neighboring responses had lower transitional RTs, while these chains were broken when two stimulus categories were used. We propose that the transitional RT approach offers a more detailed picture of the underlying task representation that reveals structure not detectable by conventional switch cost measures and does not require a priori assumptions about task organization.

Psychometric properties and measurement invariance across gender of the Italian version of the tempest self-regulation questionnaire for eating adapted for young adults

The prevalence of overweight and obesity in young adults has increased dramatically in recent decades. The unhealthy eating habits that develop at this time can often lead to negative health consequences in the future. It is therefore important to learn about self-regulation and self-control strategies and help young adults to have healthy eating behaviours. This study aims to present an Italian version of the Tempest Self-Regulation Questionnaire for Eating (TESQ-E) adapted for young adults. The instrument assesses self-regulation and self-control strategies to counteract the desire and temptation to eat unhealthy food and to choose healthy foods. A total of 645 students (271 males and 374 females with an average age of 24.82 and SD = 4.34) took part in the study. The results of the confirmatory factor analysis supported the six first-order factors model concerning specific self-regulation strategies and a higher-order structure of the TESQ-E [χ² (152) = 336.480, p < 0.001; CFI = 0.95; RMSEA = 0.04; SRMR = 0.04]: three correlated second-order factors (addressing the temptation directly, addressing the psychological meaning of temptation, and addressing the goal directly) and one-third-order factor (self-regulatory competence). The results also confirmed the strong measurement invariance of the TESQ-E across gender. To have reliable comparisons across males and females, the latent mean differences tests were performed on the six specific self-regulation strategies. The analysis showed that females appear to prefer strategies that directly address the goal by expressing explicit intentions or plans to eat in a healthy way. Convergence validity was tested through correlations with Eating-Self-Efficacy Brief Scale (ESEBS), Emotional Eating Scale (EES), Scale of Attitudes towards Healthy Eating (SAHE), and Body Mass Index (BMI). In conclusion, the TESQ-E appears to be a psychometrically sound questionnaire that can be effectively used with young adults to measure self-regulation strategies in eating in order to plan personalised interventions for the prevention and control of the metabolic syndrome, and to reduce a wide range of diet-related diseases.

A Participatory Sensing Study to Understand the Problems Older Adults Faced in Developing Medication-Taking Habits

Past research has demonstrated that older adults tend to use daily activities as cues to remember to take medications. However, they may still experience medication non-adherence because they did not select adequate contextual cues or face situations that interfere with their medication routines. This work addresses two research questions: (1) How does the association that older adults establish between their daily routines and their medication taking enable them to perform it consistently? (2) What problems do they face in associating daily routines with medication taking? For 30 days, using a mixed-methods approach, we collected quantitative and qualitative data from four participants aged 70–73 years old about their medication taking. We confirm that older adults who matched their medication regimens to their habitual routines obtained better results on time-based consistency measures. The main constraints for using daily routines as contextual cues were the insertion of medication taking into broad daily routines, the association of multiple daily routines with medication taking, the lack of strict daily routines, and the disruption of daily routines. We argue that the strategies proposed by the literature for forming medication-taking habits should support their formulation by measuring patients’ dosage patterns and generating logs of their daily activities.

Dissociating the Neural Correlates of Planning and Executing Tasks with Nested Task Sets

Task processing (e.g., the preparation and execution of responses) and task representation (e.g., the activation and maintenance of stimulus-response and context information) are two facets of cognitive control supported by lateral frontal cortex (LFC). However, the mechanistic overlap (or distinction) between these two facets is unknown. We explored this by combining a complex task mapping with a precueing procedure. Participants made match/nonmatch judgments on pairs of stimuli during fMRI recording. Precues on each trial gave variable amounts of information to the participant in anticipation of the stimulus. Our results demonstrated that regions throughout LFC were more active at the stimulus (when responses could be executed) than at the cue (when they could only be prepared), indicating that they supported execution of the task agnostic to the specific task representation. A subset of regions in the left caudal LFC showed increased activity with more cue information at the cue and the reverse at the stimulus, suggesting their involvement in reducing uncertainty within the task representation. These results suggest that one component of task processing is preparing and executing the task according to the relevant representation, confined to left caudal LFC, whereas nonrepresentational functions that occur primarily during execution are supported by different regions throughout the rest of LFC. We further conducted an exploratory investigation of connectivity between the two groups of regions in this study and their potential relationship to the frontoparietal and cingulo-opercular networks. Regions with both patterns of activity appear to be part of the frontoparietal network.

Towards an Ideology-Free, Truly Mechanistic Health Psychology

Efficient transfer of concepts and mechanistic insights from the cognitive to the health sciences and back requires a clear, objective description of the problem that this transfer ought to solve. Unfortunately, however, the actual descriptions are commonly penetrated with, and sometimes even motivated by, cultural norms and preferences, a problem that has colored scientific theorizing about behavioral control—the key concept for many psychological health interventions. We argue that ideologies have clouded our scientific thinking about mental health in two ways: by considering the societal utility of individuals and their behavior a key criterion for distinguishing between healthy and unhealthy people, and by dividing what actually seem to be continuous functions relating psychological and neurocognitive underpinnings to human behavior into binary, discrete categories that are then taken to define clinical phenomena. We suggest letting both traditions go and establish a health psychology that restrains from imposing societal values onto individuals, and then taking the fit between behavior and values to conceptualize unhealthiness. Instead, we promote a health psychology that reconstructs behavior that is considered to be problematic from well-understood mechanistic underpinnings of human behavior.

The Me-File: An Event-Coding Approach to Self-Representation

Numerous authors have taken it for granted that people represent themselves or even have something like “a self”, but the underlying mechanisms remain a mystery. How do people represent themselves? Here I propose that they do so not any differently from how they represent other individuals, events, and objects: by binding codes representing the sensory consequences of being oneself into a Me-File, that is, into an event file integrating all the codes resulting from the behaving me. This amounts to a Humean bundle-self theory of selfhood, and I will explain how recent extensions of the Theory of Event Coding, a general theory of human perception and action control, provide all the necessary ingredients for specifying the mechanisms underlying such a theory. The Me-File concept is likely to provide a useful mechanistic basis for more specific and more theoretically productive experimentation, as well as for the construction of artificial agents with human-like selves.