About the composition of self-relevance: Conjunctions not features are bound to the self

Abstract

Sui and colleagues (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 38, 1105Performance, 38, -1117Performance, 38, , 2012) introduced a matching paradigm to investigate prioritized processing of instructed self-relevance. They arbitrarily assigned simple geometric shapes to the participant and two other persons. Subsequently, the task was to judge whether label-shape pairings matched or not. The authors found a remarkable self-prioritization effect, that is, for matching selfrelated trials verification was very fast and accurate in comparison to the non-matching conditions. We analyzed whether single features or feature conjunctions are tagged to the self. In particular, we assigned colored shapes to the labels and included partial-matching trials (i.e., trials in which only one feature matched the label, whereas the other feature did not match the label). If single features are tagged to the self, partial matches would result in interference, whereas they should elicit the same data pattern as non-matching trials if only feature conjunctions are tagged to the self. Our data suggest the latter; only feature conjunctions are tagged to the self and are processed in a prioritized manner. This result emphasizes the functionality of self-relevance as a selection mechanism.

Are Self-Related Items Unique? The Self-Prioritization Effect Revisited

“…The notion that associating items to the self affects perceptual processing has been recently challenged by the results of several studies (Janczyk et al, 2018;Schäfer et al, 2016). Consistent with these findings we also found inconsistent effects of self-related items on perceptual sensitivity and strong evidence that the effect is largely related to response bias (increased tendency to respond match, for self-related items).…”

Saliency at first sight: instant identity referential advantage toward a newly met partner

“…The partner-advantage in experiment 1 is unexpected because facilitated performance was observed only for familiar people (e.g. friends and mothers) in previous studies (Schäfer et al, 2016; Sui et al, 2012; Sun, Fuentes, Humphreys, & Sui, 2016). Our participants had no social interaction or verbal communication with their assigned partners and never heard each other’s names.…”

“…A similar advantage also applies to significant others such as friends and mothers, although to a lesser extent. Better performance was observed in a face identity classification task when friends’ rather than strangers’ faces were present (Sui & Humphreys, 2013) and in a shape-identity matching task when shapes were associated with a friend or mother than with a stranger (Sui et al, 2012) or a neutral object (Schäfer, Frings, & Wentura, 2016). Zhang and colleagues (Zhang, Zhu, & Wu, 2014) asked participants to judge a total of 144 traits of self, a close friend, and a celebrity, followed by a surprising memory recognition task on trait adjectives.…”

It’s not always about me: The effects of prior beliefs and stimulus prevalence on self–other prioritisation

“…Inspection of the extant literature on self-prioritisation yields an interesting observation. The apparent inevitability and exclusivity of the self-prioritisation effect derives, for the most part, from studies that have used either Sui et al’s (2012) original shape-matching task or variants of this paradigm (Frings & Wentura, 2014; Mattan et al, 2015; Payne et al, 2017; Schäfer et al, 2015, 2016; Wozniak & Knoblich, 2019). Indeed, in other experimental contexts, self-prioritisation has proved considerably less reliable (Falbén et al, 2019; Siebold et al, 2015; Stein et al, 2016; Wade & Vickery, 2018).…”