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Category: Project

Description: The self-model is a dynamic, cognitively constructed representation integrating one’s own dispositions, traits, history, agency, body-representations. It is continually shaped by our experiences and in turn, shapes how we act in the world. The experiences associated with pregnancy provide a unique opportunity to study how the brain learns self-related information anew, as the mother’s* sense of self is destabilised at many levels of cortical processing. Pregnant people must learn to attribute sensations from within the body, which have always been attributable to the self, to another organism, the human foetus. Further, in most cases, pregnant women learn to embody the new social role of mother, which involves adopting a new set of values and dispositions for action. This upheaval in many aspects of the self during pregnancy provide a unique opportunity to study learning related to the healthy, changing self. In this experiment, we test a group of women who are pregnant for the first time (primigravida) against a group of never-been-pregnant women (nulligravida) for differences in self-reported measures of the self, the body, and sense of control. We also compare performance on tasks which measure implicit, low level cognitive biases towards self-related stimuli, and an implicit measure of the sense of agency. *Mother and women here are operationalised as individuals with a womb, and are not intended to exclude trans and nonbinary people who carry children.