Self-related shapes can hold the eyes

Abstract

Increasing evidence suggests that individuals are highly sensitive to self-related stimuli. Here, we report two experiments conducted to assess whether two schematic stimuli, arbitrarily associated with either the self or a stranger, can shape attention holding in an oculomotor task. In both experiments, participants first completed a manual matching task in which they were asked to associate the self and a stranger with two shapes (triangle vs. square). Then, in an oculomotor task, they were asked to perform a saccade from the centre of the screen towards a peripheral target while either the triangle or the square were centrally presented. In Experiment 1, saccades had to be performed on each trial—irrespective of the central shape—while in Experiment 2, saccades had to be performed only when the central shape was associated with either the self or the stranger, depending on block instruction. Participants were slower to initiate a saccade away from the central shape when this was associated with the self rather than with the stranger, but this pattern of results emerged only in Experiment 2. Overall, these data suggest that stimuli associated with the self through episodic learning can hold attention when the self/other distinction is a task-relevant dimension.

Stranger to my face: Top-down and bottom-up effects underlying prioritization of images of one’s face

“…The results showed that if the pairings were matching, then participants were faster to judge self-associated than friend-or stranger-associated stimuli, suggesting that participants demonstrated a "self-prioritization effect" for arbitrary rapidly self-associated geometrical shapes. This effect was later replicated with geometrical shapes [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34], other kinds of visual stimuli, such as Gabor patches [35], tilted lines [36], images of food [37], avatars [38], and faces [20,39], as well as with stimuli in other sensory modalities [40][41][42].…”

“…While our focus was on dissociation of top-down and bottom-up mechanisms, other studies focused on different aspects of self-prioritization. For example, several recent studies have investigated whether arbitrary self-association affects processes related to spatial attention in a visual search task [36,71] and in a spatial cuing tasks [21,33], finding evidence that only in specific contexts can such modulation take place. Other studies have investigated whether self-associated stimuli have privileged access to consciousness, but have found inconsistent results ( [72] vs [35,73]).…”

Early saccade planning cannot override oculomotor interference elicited by gaze and arrow distractors

“…The present study is also embedded in a recent stream of oculomotor research in which relevant factors are manipulated within the same block of trials on the one hand, or in different blocks on the other hand (e.g., Dalmaso, Castelli, & Galfano, 2019;Dalmaso, Castelli, & Galfano, 2020c;Zeligman & Zivotofsky, 2017). One specific manner in which this goal can be achieved is by manipulating experimental instructions in such a way that the participants are forced to adopt either a broad or a narrow attentional set depending on whether their knowledge about a taskrelevant feature (e.g., the direction of the instructed saccade or the target location) is kept constant within a block of trials or changes unpredictably from trial to trial.…”

Does Self-Associating a Geometric Shape Immediately Cause Attentional Prioritization?

“…In experimental psychology, spatial cuing tasks represent an established paradigm to measure the impact of self-relevance on cognitive information processing (Alexopoulos et al, 2012; Dalmaso et al, 2019; Sui et al, 2009; Wójcik et al, 2018). These tasks consist of responding to targets which appear at locations that are either cued by a stimulus of interest (valid trials) presented shortly before the target (i.e., with a short stimulus-onset asynchrony [SOA], ≤ 200 ms) or not (invalid trials).…”

“…Remarkably, the self-associated arrow was more efficient in guiding attention than the friend-associated arrow (see Zhao et al, 2015, for limitations of this effect). Likewise, in an oculomotor task, saccades toward targets positioned away from self- versus other-associated shapes were initiated more slowly (Dalmaso et al, 2019). In visual search, the cuing of target locations by new self-associated stimuli enhanced target detection in some studies (Wade & Vickery, 2018), but not in others (Siebold et al, 2015).…”