Mateusz Wozniak

What is the self, exactly? How does it develop? And how do its different components — the sense of being a body, the sense of having a mind, the sense of belonging to a group — relate to each other? These are old philosophical questions, but in this work I approach them with modern cognitive science and neuroscience as tools. The aim is to build a theoretical framework that connects what philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists mean when they talk about "the self" — because right now, these communities often talk past each other.

TWO SELVES IN ONE: THE "I" AND THE "ME"

The philosopher William James famously distinguished between the "I" — the self as the experiencing, acting subject — and the "Me" — the self as an object we reflect on and think about. In this paper I argue that this distinction maps onto real cognitive and neural differences: the "I" and the "Me" are not just philosophical concepts, but distinct psychological systems that can be dissociated. Psychiatric conditions like depersonalization, for instance, can undermine the "I" (the felt sense of being present in one's body) while leaving the "Me" (the abstract self-concept) intact. This framework helps explain why different experimental manipulations in the lab affect only some aspects of self-processing and not others.

Woźniak, M. (2018). "'I' and 'Me': the self in the context of consciousness". Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1656.

HOW DOES THE SELF GROW? A BRAIN-BASED ACCOUNT OF DEVELOPMENT

The self is not something we are born with — it is something the brain constructs, and keeps refining, throughout life. In this paper I use the Bayesian brain framework (the idea that the brain is essentially a prediction machine) to explain how self-representation develops from infancy to adulthood.

The core idea: the infant brain gradually learns to distinguish sensations it caused itself from sensations caused by the outside world. Over time, this process builds increasingly abstract representations of "who I am" — a model that can, in adults, incorporate novel things like avatar faces or robotic bodies with surprising ease. The theory also makes predictions about when development goes wrong: disruptions at different stages should produce different patterns of self-related difficulties, which is consistent with what we see in conditions ranging from autism to psychosis.

Woźniak, M. (2024). "How to grow a self: development of self-representation in the Bayesian brain". Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 18.

HOW STABLE — OR FLEXIBLE — IS THE SELF?

Together with Marek Van Buuren and Pawel Tacikowski, I edited a special issue bringing together behavioral and neural evidence on self-concept plasticity — how much the self can actually change, and over what timescales. The editorial situates recent empirical findings within broader debates about whether the self is a stable core identity or a continuously updated model.

Woźniak, M., Van Buuren, M. & Tacikowski, P. (2025). "Self-concept plasticity: Behavioral and neural evidence". Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 19, 1584910.