SOAP Opera: Self as Object and Agent in Prioritizing Attention

Abstract

A growing body of evidence has demonstrated that multiple sources of salience tune attentional sets toward aspects of the environment, including affectively and motivationally significant categories of stimuli such as angry faces and reward-associated target locations. Recent evidence further indicates that objects that have gained personal significance through ownership can elicit similar attentional prioritization. Here we discuss current research on sources of attentional prioritization that shape our awareness of the visual world from moment to moment and the underlying neural systems and contextualize what is known about attentional prioritization of our possessions within that research. We review behavioral and neuroimaging research on the influence of self-relevance and ownership on cognition and discuss challenges to this literature stemming from different modes of conceptualizing and operationalizing the self. We argue that ownership taps into both "self-as-object," which characterizes the self as an object with a constellation of traits and attributes, and "self-as-subject," which characterizes the self as an agentic perceiver and knower. Despite an abundance of research probing neural and behavioral indices of self-as-object and its effects on attention, there exists a paucity of research on the influence of self-relevance of attention when self is operationalized from the perspective of a first-person subject. To begin to address this gap, we propose the Self as Ownership in Attentional Prioritization (SOAP) framework to explain how ownership increases salience through attention to external representations of self-identity (i.e., self as object) and attention to contextually mediated permission to act (i.e., self as subject).

Mine or mother’s? Exploring the self-ownership effect across cultures

“…Additional experimentation is needed to establish the reliability of this effect. This unexpected finding aside, the current work nevertheless underscores the value of drift diffusion modeling when exploring self-prioritization effects in perceptual decision-making (Humphreys and Sui 2016;Sui and Humphreys 2015;Truong and Todd 2017). To fully realize the potential of this approach, future research should consider the effects of ownership on a wider range of objects (e.g., desirable vs. undesirable items, valuable vs. worthless items) among culturally diverse samples to pinpoint exactly when and how self-relevance triggers stimulus prioritization during decisional processing.…”

“…Intriguingly, variants of these self-biases have also been observed in other primates; notably chimpanzees, orangutans, and capuchin monkeys (e.g., Brosnan et al 2007;Chen et al 2006;Lakshminarayanan et al 2008). Given the primacy of self-other differentiation during early perceptual processing (Northoff 2016;Reddy 2008;Ruffman 2004;Truong and Todd 2017), it is perhaps unsurprising that cultural differences in selfconstrual do not influence the effects of ownership on object categorization (Humphreys and Sui 2016;Sui and Humphreys 2015;Truong and Todd, 2017). As previously noted, however, future research should investigate this issue in greater detail to establish exactly when cultural factors do, and do not, impact object processing and response generation.…”

“…are fastest and most accurate for stimulus-pairs associated with the self (vs. mother), an effect that is displayed by Western and Asian participants alike (see Sui et al 2012Sui et al , 2014. According to Sui and Humphreys (2015), through reciprocal connections between regions of the prefrontal (i.e., vMPFC) and temporal (i.e., posterior STS) cortices, a Self-Attention Network (SAN) serves to enhance the perceptual salience of personally-relevant material Johnson 2012, 2015;Northoff 2016;Schmitz and Johnson 2007;Sui and Gu 2017;Truong and Todd 2017). In turn, this enhanced perceptual salience facilitates stimulus processing and task performance, quite independently of patterns of cultural socialization (Sui et al 2014).…”

“…Little wonder, therefore, researchers have spent decades exploring the effects of self-referential processing on cognition and decision-making. The fruits of these efforts have been considerable, with a powerful message emanating from the literature-selfrelevance exerts a potent influence on stimulus processing and response generation (Baumeister 1998;Conway and Pleydell-Pearce 2000;Heatherton 2011;Sui and Humphreys 2015;Truong and Todd 2017). Quite when and how some of these effects arise, however, remains a matter of continued empirical investigation.…”

Social targets improve body-based and environment-based strategies during spatial navigation

“…It has been argued before that visual body perception triggers attentional focus (Weaver and Lauwereyns 2011;Gluckman and Johnson 2013;Solyst and Buffalo 2014), perhaps via attentional prioritization (Truong and Todd 2016). Attentional prioritization also modulates hippocampal networks, and the PPC (Cordova et al 2016;Levichkina et al 2017).…”