Dissociations of Personally Significant and Task-Relevant Distractors Inside and Outside the Focus of Attention: A Combined Behavioral and Psychophysiological Study.

Abstract

Studies of attentional capture by personally significant stimuli have reached inconsistent results, possibly because of improper control of the participants' attention. In the present study, the authors controlled visual attention by using a Stroop-like task. Participants responded to a central color and ignored a word presented either centrally (i.e., at the focus of attention) or peripherally (i.e., outside the focus of attention). Central words led to slower reaction times and larger orienting responses for significant items than for neutral items. These effects largely disappeared when the words appeared in a peripheral location. The peripheral words interfered with performance when they were relevant to task demands. These results indicate that there is a fundamental difference between task-relevant words and personally significant words: The former capture attention even when presented peripherally, whereas the latter do not.

Behavioral and Physiological Measures in the Detection of Concealed Information.

“…This finding converges with previous studies demonstrating that although the behavioral effects of task-relevant stimuli (e.g., color words in a color-naming task) remain relatively stable over time, enhanced latencies to personally related items (e.g., one's own name) and to emotionally charged words attenuate dramatically with practice (Gronau et al, 2003;Harris & Pashler, 2004). Thus, it seems that habituation processes known to influence autonomic measures (e.g., Sokolov, 1963) may also affect RTs to significant stimuli in the CIT.…”

You do not find your own face faster; you just look at it longer

“…Similarly, in the study by Laarni et al (2000), the task-irrelevant presentation of the self-face did not interfere with the main task. In this study, the self-face appeared in the background with target items presented in the foreground (see also Gronau et al, 2003 for similar findings with one's own name). So in that case, the input filter probably included spatial location.…”

“…Our data thus seem to support this view and indicate that some "self-effects"² found previously might also be due to a difficulty to disengage attention rather than to a prioritized processing of self-referential stimuli. Indeed, those effects have been found when self-referential stimuli that were irrelevant to the ongoing task were located within the focus of attention (Gronau et al, 2003;Wolford & Morrison, 1980) but not when located outside the focus of attention (Bundesen et al, 1997;Gronau et al, 2003;Laarni et al, 2000), suggesting that they do not summon attention. In other words, discrepancies between previous studies could be explained in terms of attentional disengagement rather than in terms of the ability to attract attention automatically.…”

“…For instance, it has been shown that self-referential stimuli elicited specific effects when their processing was somehow related with the task at hand (Brédart et al, 2006;Gronau et al, 2003;Kawahara & Yamada, 2004;Shapiro et al, 1997) but not when their processing was totally irrelevant for the task and when they never shared relevant properties with the target items (e.g. Bundesen et al, 1997).…”

“…Other studies later demonstrated that one's own name summons attention when participants are set to identify target names but not when participants are set to find the colour of a target (Kawahara & Yamada, 2004). Similarly, in a Stroop-like task, the own name attracted attention if presented centrally within the participant's attentional focus but when presented peripherally, it attracted attention only when it was task-relevant but not when it was task-irrelevant (Gronau, Cohen, & Ben-Shakhar, 2003).…”