Perceptual effects of social salience: Evidence from self-prioritization effects on perceptual matching.

Abstract

We present novel evidence showing that new self-relevant visual associations can affect performance in simple shape recognition tasks. Participants associated labels for themselves, other people, or neutral terms with geometric shapes and then immediately judged whether subsequent label-shape pairings were matched. Across 4 experiments there was a reliable self-prioritization benefit on response times and perceptual sensitivity that remained across different presentation contexts (with self, best friend, and unfamiliar others in Experiment 1; with self, best friend, and neutral terms, and with self, mother, and neutral terms in Experiments 2A and 2B, respectively. Control studies in Experiment 3 indicated that the results did not reflect the length, concreteness, or familiarity of the words. The self-prioritization effect on shape matching also increased when stimuli were degraded (self shapes showing weaker effects of degradation) in Experiment 4A, consistent with self-information modulating perceptual processing. A similar effect was found when people associated different reward values to the shape in Experiment 4B. The results indicate that associating a stimulus to the self modulates its subsequent perceptual processing, and this may operate by self-associated shapes automatically evoking the reward system.

Putting Ourselves in Another’s Skin: Using the Plasticity of Self-Perception to Enhance Empathy and Decrease Prejudice

“…This research has established that simply training people to associate self-relevant words (i.e. their own name or the word ''You'') with particular shapes can lead to improved perceptual processing of those shapes (Sui, He, & Humphreys, 2012;Sui & Humphreys, 2015). Similar perceptual effects have also been found when the same items are associated with rewards, suggesting that the effect is due to the greater value people assign themselves compared to others (Sui et al, 2012).…”

“…their own name or the word ''You'') with particular shapes can lead to improved perceptual processing of those shapes (Sui, He, & Humphreys, 2012;Sui & Humphreys, 2015). Similar perceptual effects have also been found when the same items are associated with rewards, suggesting that the effect is due to the greater value people assign themselves compared to others (Sui et al, 2012). In line with this, it has been shown that associating the self with a particular soft drink led to more positive implicit attitudes towards that drink but that this effect is mediated by self-esteem, with the increase in attitude being greatest for those with high self-esteem and less for those with low self-esteem (Prestwich, Perugini, Hurling, & Richetin, 2010).…”

Editorial: A Review of Self-Processing Biases in Cognition

“…Thus self-biases can encompass external objects (e.g., ownership and endowment effects) and even other people, such that individuals who are close to self (e.g., mother, best friend) produce attenuated SREs. Specifically, patterns of performance in memory, perception, and attention for cues of close others tend to be somewhat lower than those for self, but higher than those for strangers (Bower & Gilligan, 1979;Sui et al, 2012). This may be a result of two factors.…”

“…Sui, He, and Humphreys (2012) showed that when participants learn shape-name associations (e.g., you are the triangle, your friend is the circle, a stranger is the square), they subsequently perceive shape-name pairs involving self more quickly, and their recognition is less affected by perceptual blurring than the friend-and strangerassociated shapes. The self-associations are also formed more easily and are more difficult to break in subsequent tasks (Wang, Humphreys, & Sui, 2016).…”

“…First, there is a greater knowledge structure associated with close others (e.g., one is likely to have more rich and detailed information concerning one's mother than Brad Pitt), so consideration of close others can be richly encoded and organized within an existing structure (for review see Symons & Johnson, 1997). Secondly, close others may also be priority cues and elicit attentional and affective processing biases, although to a lesser degree than self (Sui et al, 2012).…”