Expanding and Retracting From the Self: Gains and Costs in Switching Self-Associations (original) (raw)
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Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 2014
Attentional control over prepotent responses has previously been shown by manipulating the probability with which stimuli appear. Here, we examined whether prepotent responses to self-associated stimuli can be modulated by their frequency of occurrence. Participants were instructed to associate geometric shapes with the self, their mother, or a stranger before having to judge whether the sequential shape-label pairs matched or mismatched the instruction. The probability of the different shape-label pairs was varied. There was a robust advantage to self-related stimuli in all cases. Reducing the proportion of matched self pairs did not weaken performance with self-related stimuli, whereas reducing the frequency of either matched mother or stranger pairs hurt performance, relative to when the different match trials were equiprobable. In addition, while mother and stranger pairs jointly benefitted when they both occurred frequently, there were benefits only to self pairs when the frequency of self trials increased along with either mother or stranger trials. The results suggest that biases favoring self-related stimuli occur automatically, even when self-related stimuli have a low probability of occurrence, and that expectations to frequent, selfrelated stimuli operate in a relatively exclusive manner, minimizing biases to high-probability stimuli related to other people. In contrast, biases to high-familiarity stimuli (mother pairs) can be reduced when the items occur infrequently and they do not dominate expectations over other high-frequency stimuli.
Does an experimentally induced self-association elicit affective self-prioritization
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2022
Self-relevant stimuli such as one’s name and face have been demonstrated to influence information processing in both the cognitive and affective domain. It has been observed that recently self-associated stimuli can also influence cognition, but its impact on affect has not been tested yet. In the current study (N = 107), we test whether recently self-associated stimuli yield an affective bias and compare the size of the effect to that of familiar self-associated stimuli. A Recoding-Free Implicit Association Test (IAT-RF) presenting self-associated, neutral object-associated, positive, and negative stimuli was used with two groups: one which categorized familiar words as self- and neutral object-associated stimuli, and a second which categorized recently self- and neutral object-associated geometric shapes. In both cases, response times were faster for congruent trials which mapped response keys as “positive/self” and “negative/neutral object” than incongruent trials which mapped response keys as “positive/neutral object” and “negative/self”. The size of the effect yielded by familiar and new self-associated stimuli did not differ. This indicates that experimentally induced self-association can immediately yield an affective bias in favor of the self-associated stimulus.
Experimental Psychology, 2020
In many cognitive tasks, stimuli associated to one’s self elicit faster responses than stimuli associated to others. This is true for familiar self-representations (e.g., one’s own name), for new self-associated stimuli, and for combinations of both. The current research disentangles the potential of self- vs. stranger-representations for familiar, new, and paired (familiar + new) stimuli to guide attention. In Study 1 (N = 34) responses to familiar and new self vs. other representations were tested in a dot-probe task with a short stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA; 100 ms). Study 2 (N = 31) and Study 3 (N = 35) use a long SOA (1000 ms) to test whether the findings are mirrored in inhibition of return. We observe significant performance differences for targets following self- vs. stranger-associated stimuli (i.e., a cuing effect or inhibition of return, depending on the SOA length), yet only when familiar representations are present. This indicates that, under conditions of attentional competition between self- and stranger representations, familiar self-representations impact the distribution of attention while new self-representations alone do not.
The differential outcomes procedure can overcome self-bias in perceptual matching
Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2015
There are biases in perceptual matching between shapes and labels referring to familiar others, compared with when the labels refer to unfamiliar people. We assessed whether these biases could be affected by differential feedback (using the differential outcomes procedure [DOP]) compared with when feedback is provided using a nondifferential outcomes procedure (NOP). Participants formed associations between simple geometric shapes and labels referring to people the participant did or did not know (self, best friend, other). Subsequently, the task was to match a label to one of two shapes shown on a trial. When feedback for correct responses was given following the NOP condition, matches were faster to known people (self and friend) compared with those to an unknown person (stranger). However, this advantage for known personal relations was eliminated when participants were given feedback for correct responses following the DOP condition. The data are consistent with prior work showi...
The ubiquitous self: what the properties of self-bias tell us about the self
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2016
People show systematic biases in perception, memory, and attention to favor information related to themselves over information related to other people. Researchers have examined these biases in order to throw light on the nature of the self. We review this evidence in memory, face recognition, and simple perceptual matching tasks through objective measures of self-biases. We argue that the self serves as a stable anchor across different forms of judgment and that referring a stimulus to ourselves enhances the binding of stimulus features at different stages of processing (e.g., in perception and in memory) and also the binding between processing stages. There is neural evidence that self-biases reflect an underlying neural network that interacts with but is independent of attentional control networks in the brain, and that damage to the self-related network disrupts the bias effects. We discuss the implications for understanding the nature of the self.
2014
Information related to the self tends to be better remembered than other information. Mentalization (i.e., attributing mind to an external entity) is one potential intervening factor in contrasting myself, others "like me", and inanimate objects. Twenty-seven undergraduates (mean age 23.6 years, 16 women) responded to a Remember/Know (R/K) recognition task. In the study phase, 78 words were presented at 3 levels of processing: Self (item applies to myself), Other (applies to the Queen of England) and Object (applies to statues). In test trials, subjects recognized items as Old or New. After an "Old" response, an R/K judgment was prompted. We observed significant differences in recognition reaction times (RTs) between Self/Other and Self/Object conditions. R/K judgment RTs showed significant differences between Self/Object conditions. Results support self-reference at a deeper level of processing, but not in a continuum from self to other and to inanimate object.
Implicit measures have revealed that cognitive representations of familiar individuals share associations with self-concept; however, this has yet to be established for novel individuals. We examined how self-similarity affects representation of information learned about new individuals. A novel version of the implicit association test (IAT), the self-similarity IAT, was developed to estimate the extent to which cognitive representations of new self-similar and self-dissimilar individuals are associated with self-representation. Categorization was faster when the self-similar individual was paired with self, not only for trait words related to the novel individuals, but also for unrelated demographic information pertaining only to self. This provides the first evidence using an implicit task that self-similarity may act as a heuristic for creating representations of new individuals.
Asymmetric Self-Other Similarity Judgments Depend on Priming of Self-Knowledge
Social Cognition, 1992
The asymmetry effect in self-other similarity judgments refers to a tendency for similarity judgments to be higher when self is used as a reference point in the comparison ("How similar is (Person X) to youV questions) than when the self is used as a subject ("How similar are you to (Person X)V questions). Two experiments were conducted to examine the impact of priming of self-knowledge on the asymmetry effect. As predicted from the Tversky's (1977) contrast model, there was a significant interaction between priming of self-knowledge and the direction of the comparison. Higher similarity judgments for "How similar is (Person X) to youV questions as compared to "How similar are you to (Person X)V questions were found in the Self-Primed condition but not in the Control condition or in the Other-Primed condition. Theoretical implications in terms of the organization of self-knowledge in memory and in terms of general processes underlying asymmetric similarity judgments are discussed. This research was partially supported by funds from the University of North Florida SEED grant and from the Instytut Psychologii Polskiej Akademii Nauk, project# CPBP 0802. Portions of this manuscript were written when the first author was a William
Frontiers in Psychology, 2023
Processing advantages arising from self-association have been documented across various stimuli and paradigms. However, the implications of "selfassociation" for affective and social behavior have been scarcely investigated. The approach-avoidance task (AAT) offers an opportunity to investigate whether the privileged status of the "self" may also translate into differential evaluative attitudes toward the "self" in comparison to "others". In the current work, we first established shape-label associations using the associative-learning paradigm, and then asked the participants to engage in an approach-avoidance task to test whether attitudinal differences induced on the account of self-association lead to participants having different approach-avoidance tendencies toward the "self-related" stimuli relative to the "other-related" stimuli. We found that our participants responded with faster approach and slower avoidance tendencies for shapes associated with the "self" and slower approach and faster avoidance tendencies for the shapes associated with the "stranger." These results imply that "self-association" may lead to positive action tendencies toward "self-associated" stimuli, and at the same time lead to neutral or negative attitudes toward stimuli not related to the "self". Further, as the participants responded to self-associated vs. other-associated stimuli cohorts, these results may also have implications for the modulation of social group-behaviors in favor of those like the self and against those in contrast to the self-group.
Previous studies have shown that people's ability to detect, from memory, alterations in highly familiar faces is excellent. Indeed, just noticeable differences for the detection of small alterations in a recognition-memory task were not significantly different from the corresponding measures in a perceptual-discrimination task (Bre¨dart and Devue, 2006 Perception 35 101-106; Ge et al, 2003 Perception 32 601-614). The object of the present study was to evaluate whether people's perceptual memory for body shapes of very familiar persons reaches the high level of precision that was reported for face memory. For one group of participants, the task was to detect body shape alterations (an increase or a decrease of 2% to 10% of the waist-to-hip ratio) on photographs depicting either themselves or a friend. For another group of participants who did not know the target persons, the task was to discriminate whether two photographs presented side by side were the same or not. Results showed that the detection of alterations was significantly better in the perceptual-discrimination task than in the recognition-memory tasks (for the participant's own body as well as for the friend's body). In conclusion, the high fidelity of perceptual memory for very familiar faces does not extend to familiar body shapes.