Personal names and the attentional blink: A visual "cocktail party" effect.

Abstract

Four experiments were carried out to investigate an early- versus late-selection explanation for the attentional blink (AB). In both Experiments 1 and 2, 3 groups of participants were required to identify a noun (Experiment 1) or a name (Experiment 2) target (experimental conditions) and then to identify the presence or absence of a 2nd target (probe), which was their own name, another name, or a specified noun from among a noun distractor stream (Experiment 1) or a name distractor stream (Experiment 2). The conclusions drawn are that individuals do not experience an AB for their own names but do for either other names or nouns. In Experiments 3 and 4, either the participant's own name or another name was presented, as the target and as the item that immediately followed the target, respectively. An AB effect was revealed in both experimental conditions. The results of these experiments are interpreted as support for a late-selection interference account of the AB.

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

“…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).…”

“…However, given the fact that the to-be-ignored stimuli were presented at fixation, they were located within the focus of attention and were presumably attended, preventing any strong conclusion in favour of a late selection theory of attention. Subsequently, other studies demonstrated that one's own name is particularly resistant to the attentional blink (Shapiro, Caldwell, & Sorensen, 1997) and to repetition blindness (Arnell, Shapiro, & Sorensen, 1999) during rapid serial visual presentations when compared to other names or nouns. In the inattentional blindness paradigm, the own name is also less subject to blindness than other names or frequent words (Mack & Rock, 1998).…”

“…Nonetheless, a careful examination of the different paradigms and conditions used in previous studies might help resolving some of the discrepancies between the studies. It seems that "self-effects" were mostly found when selfreferential stimuli were presented centrally, within the participant's focus of attention (see e.g., Arnell et al, 1999;Gronau et al, 2003-Experiment 1;Shapiro et al, 1997;Wolford & Morrison, 1980). In that case however, it is difficult to conclude that self-referential stimuli capture attention since they were already within the focus of attention.…”

Attentional changes during implicit learning: Signal validity protects a target stimulus from the attentional blink.

“…For instance, familiar or meaningful stimuli, such as one's own name (Shapiro, Caldwell, & Sorensen, 1997) or famous faces (Jackson & Raymond, 2006) are protected to some degree from the AB as their identification is less impaired than similar but less familiar stimuli. Smith, Most, Newsome, and Zald (2006) also showed that a stimulus recently associated with an aversive burst of white noise can automatically induce an AB-like impairment when used as a distractor in an RSVP task.…”

Attention to self-referential stimuli: Can I ignore my own face?

“…For instance, in a visual analogy of the Moray's procedure, Wolford and Morrison (1980) showed that when instructed to make a parity judgment on two digits flanking a to-be-ignored word, a higher proportion of participants subsequently reported that they had seen their own name in comparison with words presented the same number of times during the experiment. Shapiro's team later showed that the own name is particularly resistant to the attentional blink (Shapiro, Caldwell, & Sorensen, 1997) and to repetition blindness (Arnell, Shapiro, & Sorensen, 1999). In addition, Mack and Rock (1998) found that almost all of their participants (88%) detected their own name when presented under conditions of inattention in the inattentional blindness paradigm.…”