The power of the self: Anchoring information processing across contexts.

Abstract

A stable self-representation has an intrinsically beneficial connotation for information processing: it allows the individual to flexibly adapt to different contexts, while prioritizing information that pertains to the own immediate survival. Indeed, many studies have shown how linking arbitrary information to physical or psychological aspects of the self leads to pervasive effects on our decision-making and even our perception. However, the evidence we have gained so far stems from isolated aspects of the self, and varying measures across studies and different levels of processing make results difficult to compare. The present study demonstrates that associating arbitrary information with the self rapidly leads to faster and more efficient processing of information, with stable performance benefits across different tasks (matching and categorization task) and stimulus domains. Focusing on specific processing levels, the findings first provide evidence regarding the involvement of self-relatedness in perception. Here, contrast processing interacted with self-relatedness, but only when complex stimuli were used. Second, they show that self-prioritization is flexible to decisional modulations, with processing benefits being adjusted to different social contexts. Third, the present data provides evidence that performance benefits toward newly self-associated, abstract information are equivalent to those resulting from long-term established self-associations with personally owned objects. The results highlight mechanistic differences between the prioritization of information linked to the self and information linked to close others. Overall, the present findings suggest that the self acts as a stable anchor in information processing, allowing us to filter information by its immediate relevance to facilitate optimal behavior.

Social relevance modulates multisensory integration.

“…Instead, it supports the notion that social relevance and the supramodal feature (here: numerosity) space are integrated (Sui & Humphreys, 2015b). Attentional resources can then be directed toward the specific feature property that obtained importance through self-relevance (Liu & Sui, 2016) and be deployed by the different senses across tasks in a highly efficient fashion (Driver & Spence, 2012; Humphreys & Sui, 2016; Spence & Driver, 1996), making the self-prioritization effect contextually flexible and adaptive (Scheller & Sui, in press; Sui & Han, 2007).…”

“…Taken together, our results suggest that multisensory integration is modulated by social (self-)relevance, in particular under conditions in which sensory uncertainty in the target modality is high. However, while SPEs are often stable at the group level, there is typically individual variation in the extent to which self- or other-related information is prioritized (Scheller & Sui, in press; Stolte et al, 2017; Sui & Humphreys, 2017a). Therefore, we followed up effects in the fission and fusion illusion with an exploratory analysis (see online ), in which only individuals were included who showed a self-related accuracy enhancement, relative to baseline, in the congruent condition ( N = 52; n Group1 = 23, n Group2 = 29).…”

“…In instances where social associations are irrelevant, personal significance becomes an internal criterion (Nakao et al, 2010; Sui & Humphreys, 2017b). Hence, while object relevance may be individually specific, self-relevance is a feature that ubiquitously possesses stronger importance, and self-attracting biases are more prevalent than biases away from the self, both in newly learned self-associations (Sui & Humphreys, 2017b) as well as long-term established self-associations such the own name or self-owned objects (Scheller & Sui, forthcoming/in press; Tacikowski & Ehrsson, 2016) or even the space around the physical own body (Noel et al, 2015; Serino, 2019). This explains why, at the individual level, biases toward one category reflect similar performance enhancements in both bimodal conditions, while there is an average shift at group level for the social association task only.…”

“…At the same time, experimental research in the area of social cognition has operationalized the self in terms of the degree of self-relatedness with external stimuli, showing how the attachment of social relevance to arbitrary, external information gives rise to instant processing advantages proportional with the social proximity to the self (Sui et al, 2012). That is, by associating information with oneself, either through ownership (Golubickis et al, 2018; Truong et al, 2017) or the integration of information into a stable, internal representation of the self (Falbén, Golubickis, Tamulaitis, et al, 2020; Hu et al, 2016; Scheller & Sui, in press; Sui et al, 2012; Woźniak & Knoblich, 2019), performance is enhanced, reflected in more accurate, sensitive, and accelerated responses toward this information compared to information associated with other individuals (Humphreys & Sui, 2016; Sui et al, 2012; Sui & Humphreys, 2015b). This self-prioritization effect (SPE) has been robustly evidenced across different tasks and types of stimuli (Hu et al, 2016; Northoff, 2016; Northoff & Hayes, 2011; Scheller & Sui, in press; Sui & Humphreys, 2017b; Woźniak & Knoblich, 2019).…”

“…That is, by associating information with oneself, either through ownership (Golubickis et al, 2018; Truong et al, 2017) or the integration of information into a stable, internal representation of the self (Falbén, Golubickis, Tamulaitis, et al, 2020; Hu et al, 2016; Scheller & Sui, in press; Sui et al, 2012; Woźniak & Knoblich, 2019), performance is enhanced, reflected in more accurate, sensitive, and accelerated responses toward this information compared to information associated with other individuals (Humphreys & Sui, 2016; Sui et al, 2012; Sui & Humphreys, 2015b). This self-prioritization effect (SPE) has been robustly evidenced across different tasks and types of stimuli (Hu et al, 2016; Northoff, 2016; Northoff & Hayes, 2011; Scheller & Sui, in press; Sui & Humphreys, 2017b; Woźniak & Knoblich, 2019). Its evolutionary perseverance (Northoff & Panksepp, 2008; Panksepp & Northoff, 2009), specificity (Constable, Rajsic, et al, 2019; Schäfer, Frings, & Wentura, 2016), and contextual flexibility (Caughey et al, 2021; Falbén, Golubickis, Wischerath, et al, 2020) suggest that self-prioritization plays an adaptive role in information processing.…”